


Your Wound, My Sutures

by kayura_sanada



Category: Avengers Assemble (Cartoon), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (AA Only), But If You Don't Know AA It May Be A Little Confusing, Established Relationship, Happy Ending, Inhumans - Freeform, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Predominantly Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tony Angst, Tony Gets Validation And Love, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Vision Loves Tony Pass It On, Weird Stuff Is Normal For These People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2018-12-02 22:38:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11518962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayura_sanada/pseuds/kayura_sanada
Summary: Tony lives a happy life with his friends and fellow Avengers in the mansion. But can such a beautiful dream really be reality?





	1. We Are What We Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eprnam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eprnam/gifts).



The man had to lean over to whisper in her ear, even as they sat beside one another on the park bench. She tilted her head, eager to learn more, only for him to ask, in that lilting accent, "did you know the minds we follow are as important as what we do to them?"

She paused, letting her fingers grow idle as she pondered the question. "How do you mean?"

The man made a simple motion with his hand, twisting the palm up and curling the fingers, then the palm, back down. The energy of his own mind swirled in a deep purple, almost like a wing unfurling. In an instant, it disappeared once more, but the image of it was trapped behind her eyes. "Think about it. You touch, but do you truly think yourself untouched? Your mind reaches out across the world. What are the chances that what you touch would not affect you, as you may affect it?"

It sounded so obvious, when he said it. Why had she never thought about it before?

"That is why you must be careful who you keep your mind near," he said, leaning back up and smiling down at her. "The company you have now is good. It's created a healthy force. But I wonder at those you might align yourself with in the future."

She scowled darkly. No doubt the man referred to _him_. The one she herself worried about. The one who had locked her up. She glared down at the ground.

"Do not look so upset. I bring this up not to discourage you, but to help you."

She looked up to him, her neck craning back. "There's nothing to be done for it," she told him. "And you've already helped so much these past weeks."

But he just waved her words away. "I have only taught you what I have struggled to learn over my years. I wish I had that opportunity. In time, I have no doubt you will learn more than me." He scratched momentarily at the stubble on his thin chin, then nodded, as if coming to some sort of decision. "There is something I have always done to ensure I am not placing myself near those who could not be trusted. If you are careful – but you have shown to have remarkable control."

She leaned toward him. "Teach me."

* * *

Clint threw another piece of popcorn. It landed on the floor by Tony's feet. He stared at it. He stared at it very hard.

"Shut up, you giant green bludgeon! I'm trying to play my game!"

"And I wanna watch my show! It comes on every Tuesday at eight and you know it."

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was to find Steve walking into the living room, hands on his hips. "What is going on here?"

No, Cap. Hadn't he learned his lesson by now?

Just as Tony had known they would, both Clint and Hulk pointed to each other and started shouting. Steve took a deep breath and gusted it out, trying to parse Clint's allegations from Hulk's. While it should have been easy, what with the difference in vocal tones, they had this uncanny ability to sound like little more than an annoying buzz. Or maybe it was because it was nearly background noise at this point.

"One at a time," Steve said. He didn’t sigh, but Tony knew he wanted to.

"Clint's on his game, Hulk wants to watch his fantasy drama," Tony said into the momentary silence, jumping in before the two on the couch could start fighting over who would speak first. Recognizing him as the port in the storm, Steve turned to him. Tony smirked. "Clint's been on for four hours, so Hulk should be allowed his hour."

"You heard him," Steve said, not looking away from Tony's face as he spoke to Clint. "Your get your hour, Hulk, but not a minute longer. You're the one who constantly picks fights over getting to play your video games. Think about that while you watch your show."

Clint scoffed, but saved and got off. Not without a lot of theatrics, of course. And when the remote was in Hulk's hand, he tossed another piece of popcorn into the man's face. Hulk growled at him in warning.

"And you'll be cleaning up any mess you make," Steve added. The affronted look on Clint's face morphed into something closer to horror. He looked over the vestiges of the couch and grimaced. Underneath the crumbs and kernels and chips, there might have been a sofa.

Steve reached out to take Tony's arm, leading him over to the kitchen nook. Tony sat down and leaned over the counter to watch Steve as he moved to the counter to start cooking. He leaned down and pulled out a pan, showing off that beautifully toned ass. Somehow, this man was a secret homebody. "Way to walk out of the minefield you walked into to begin with."

Steve shot a grin over his shoulder as he put the pan on the stove and went to the freezer. "It's a field I'm well versed in."

"That's just sad." He looked over to the two; Clint had apparently decided to sit back and enjoy the show, too, though he'd had to give up his position in the middle of the sofa. Hulk was leaning forward, hands on elbows, eyes glued to the screen. At least Clint had the sense to avoid antagonizing Hulk during his show. Or maybe he was just contemplating how much more difficult it was going to be to clean the sofa after Hulk's bulk finished squishing the stray food into the fibers. "So how's your day been?"

"Good. We got some new training in. I'm sure Falcon will be thrilled to tell you more."

Tony grinned. "Got the spin spray down, does he?"

"Let him show you," Steve said, his voice fond as he turned to the sink, washing the chicken in the sink. "Want to chop onions?"

"Trying to get me all teared up, Cap?" He reached out when Steve brought him the knife, only to jump in surprise when Steve kept his grip on the blade and leaned in for a kiss. He tilted his head and lifted his chin, accepting the peck with a dopey grin.

Clint made gagging noises behind them.

Steve sent the man a haughty stare and took a much deeper, more leisurely kiss, much to Clint's dismay. Tony laughed into Steve's lips. Not one to waste an opportunity, he reached up with his free hand and slid his fingers down that square jaw, over the edge of those soft lips, right beside where they met his own. He licked inside once, twice. Just enough to feel the beginning of a moan rumble up that wide chest. Then he backed away. Steve's eyes were glazed when they looked at him. "Well," he said. "That was nice."

"Puke, puke, double puke."

"Shut up, Arrowface. I'm watching the show."

"It's advertisements!"

Steve smiled and shook his head. "Just to let you know, Tony. My goal is never to make you tear up."

There was definitely an innuendo in there. Tony grinned when he caught it. Clint leaned over the back of the sofa and pretended to throw up, so he must have caught it, too.

"Let me guess," Natasha said, strolling into the room and plucking the knife from Tony's hands, practically slicing the onion before Steve could take it out of the fridge. "Tony and Steve are being disgustingly moony again."

"It's been two weeks, you think they'd be past the honeymoon stage," Clint said.

She looked at Tony, still sitting at the counter with his hand out as if she would ever return the knife to him, then at Steve, who was suddenly very busy pulling out spices and seasonings. "After how long they pined for each other? They'll need at least another two weeks. Three, I'd wager."

Clint groaned at the very thought.

* * *

The Wrecking Crew made an appearance at the downtown national museum. Tony had no idea why they bothered; they had a long criminal record, but a nonexistent record of victories. He ordered his team to suit up and head out, only for his own trip to be waylaid by the sound of a woman crying. Nothing too terribly surprising; a good amount of public property was always destroyed by the Wrecking Crew. But it could also mean something much worse. "Uh, guys, I'll be right with you," he said, and headed off to investigate.

The feeling that things had gone bad rose sharply as he realized the crying was happening from an alleyway. He slowed down and turned his head. "Friday. Lighting?"

He wasn't foolish enough to head into an alley alone while on a mission. It would be asking to walk into a trap. But when Friday managed to alter the lighting, upping the contrast, he could see a shadowy form hunched against the wall of what was apparently a law firm. He moved to hover just beside the entrance to the alleyway and found the woman to be wearing a pencil-skirt suit in a very light pink. It was something Pepper might have worn, and due entirely to that, he found himself lowering his guard. "Scans?"

"Human, female, around twenty-five years of age. No unusual substances or chemicals. No guns, knives, or alternative weapons."

He lowered himself down to the ground. The woman hiccuped and looked up from her knees. Her nails clenched into his skirt. "He made me do it," she said. More tears spilled. "He made me do it. He made me do it." Over and over, her voice wetter and wetter, tears pouring again and again. "He..."

"It's all right," he tried, even though he was not good with tears. He bent down, let his faceplate slide up. "Hey. It's okay. Just tell me what happened."

"He made me do it," she said again. Her brown hair, likely once in a no-nonsense bun, fell limply around her cheek and neck. "He made me."

"All right. All right. Who?"

She shook her head again. He could hear, over the comms, Captain America ordering Falcon and Thor up high. "Guys," he said, "there's a woman here. Hurt. I'm taking her to the hospital."

"All right, Iron Man. Meet back with us when you can."

He reached out slowly, but she didn't flinch away or try to run, so he wrapped his arms around her. "I'm going to take you to a hospital, all right?"

"He made me," she said, again and again and again. He lifted her up and took off.

* * *

By the time he made it back, the others had already started on clean-up. "Sorry 'bout that, Cap," he said, landing quickly and looking around. Hulk and Thor had clearly held back; very little damage had hit the streets this time. He saw Cap and Black Widow speaking with the police, Hawkeye and Falcon helping to get the stolen goods back inside the bank. Thor and Hulk were clearing up the worst of the rubble from the side wall of the bank. "Looks like you didn't need me for this one."

"It was a little too easy," Cap agreed, apparently taking a leaf out of Clint's suspiciousness. "What about that woman?"

"She's physically all right." He shrugged, the armor moving sinuously around him. "I don't know. She just keeps saying the same thing over and over. 'He made me do it.'"

Cap stopped in the middle of moving a piece of rubble and turned to him, brows drawn low beneath his cowl. "That doesn't sound good."

"No, it doesn't." He put his hands on his hips. "I wanted to scan the area where I found her; there might be some sort of clue as to what happened. I can't help but feel that these two seemingly separate problems are anything but."

Cap waved him away. "Go. We have things handled here. I'll radio in if anything changes."

"Roger that, Rogers," he said, and got to watch the fond exasperation play along Steve's face at the old joke. His heart fluttered like a schoolgirl's. It was a nice consolation when, twenty minutes later, he found not a trace of anything that could lead him to an answer as to what that woman had been talking about.

* * *

She stared down at her hands. She didn't know if it would be wise to do as her mentor had taught her. He was right that it was the best way to know without undue cruelty. And it was true that, if she just gave her mind and powers away to just anyone, she could end up harming too many people. She already knew that sort of pain. She didn't want to go through it again. And if she did? If she trusted the wrong person, followed the wrong person's lead?

She looked up. The tower was tall before her. She'd never noticed its height before, the way it loomed over those below it. The way it stood over her. Staring at her. Judging her.

That was ridiculous. It was a _building_.

She took a deep breath. A simple conversation wouldn't hurt. She could decide what to do after that.

* * *

He met up with the others in the tower, calling out a hello even as he entered the building. Clint and Hulk called back, once more battling for control of the television. Thor was rummaging for food in the fridge; from what Tony could see, the man had taken a short break from video games, and Clint had decided to get in on the action. He shook his head. No one else was in the room; Sam was probably in the lab, and Widow likely had some long-standing date with the training room again.

So where was Steve?

He turned to the gym.

The sound of impacts carried like a siren song to his ears as he stepped off the elevator and wound his way through the halls to the gym. He leaned against the door and just watched. Steve was in a t-shirt and sweatpants, both oddly tight around his muscles. The workout had turned his body glistening as he moved, tape around his knuckles as he fought off the punching bag with easy, practiced motions. The sound was one that could nearly lull Tony to sleep; some days, he would come and sit, letting the sound relax him as he worked through some complex modifications or difficult tech. Other times, he would volunteer to be Steve's punching bag instead.

"Hey," he said softly, even though Steve had certainly known Tony was there. The man stopped punching his cares away and smiled at him.

"Hey."

"So," he said, and pushed off from the doorjam, making his way toward Steve. "No sign of anyone else in that alley in the hour or so before her – fingerprints would be a complete waste, of course, along with anything else – and there was nothing to suggest any foul play. No residual sign of any tech or magic, and no reports of any Inhumans around the area, either. Medusa said there aren't any known to even live in the town."

"So nothing." Tony stopped right in front of Steve, slightly in his space. They grinned at each other. Steve swept his thumb down Tony's temple to his jaw. "Maybe she had nothing to do with the Wrecking Crew, after all."

"Gotta love your optimism, Cap." Tony leaned his head back. Steve obligingly kissed him. Before they pulled back, Tony licked at Steve's upper lip, catching at the beads of sweat there. "I'm more concerned that something big went down, or is about to go down, somewhere. And with our luck, that's pretty much bound to be the case."

"Let's not go looking for trouble just yet," Steve said. He started working on untying the tape around his fingers. "We don't know anything about this yet. Whatever that woman's been through, it's enough to know she's been hurt."

"Yeah. Except we have no idea how or by whom."

One hand done, Steve moved on to the next. "We'll worry about that as it comes. One battle at a time, Shellhead."

Tony flicked his hands over Steve's ears, curling the tips of his fingers through that hair. "I'd rather find something else to do at the moment than fight, Winghead." He grinned. "You up for a little more exercise?"

Steve barely got the last of the tape off before he was flinging it to the side and wrapping his hands around Tony. Those thick arms pulled him in close, until his clean shirt was pressed against the sweat-soaked tee Steve wore. He ran his hands down Steve's shoulders, catching the tiny sheen of perspiration on the pads of his fingers. "I think I could be persuaded," Steve said. Tony chuckled.

"Lock the doors, Friday. We don't want to scar anyone over this."

"Anyone but me," Friday said primly, and did as told.

* * *

She stared down at her trembling hands. She'd done it. Even as she'd spoken to him, she'd known this would have to be how it ended. The man knew nothing but lies and masks. How could she ever trust anything he ever said? Anything he ever did? How could she _know_ without checking?

She'd done it. And she'd checked. And she felt sick.

None of this had ever been necessary. She'd seen a darkness in him years ago. A darkness she'd purposefully entangled in a web of fear and pain, knowing it would lead the man to his own destruction. Why, then, did she think she would find something other than this?

She covered her mouth with her shaking fingers and clenched her eyes shut. She needed to concentrate. To end it. She'd been taught how to do that. Okay. Okay. One deep breath, then another. Another. Another, and finally she could feel her heart start to calm. Adrenaline raced through her veins, and she glanced around. No one had seen what she'd done. They'd been alone. He'd granted her the private audience she'd requested.

"Okay," she said, and let her own voice calm her. She would bring him back and apologize. In a few minutes, she would be sitting through a lecture and everything would be all right.

She twisted the world, pulled her energy through the twists of reality perception created. She could see his mind, playing out the role she'd demanded it to. She could always play it off, if she really wanted to. Pretend he'd simply fallen asleep and pretended to dream. She'd had reason not to trust him. No one trusted him.

It was something to worry about later. Once she’d freed him.

She performed the steps she'd been taught. Reddish-pink crackled the air. First, find the layer of dream-wish amidst the reality of the world. Second, find his mind, separate from the dream. Third, pull the two apart, separating the dream-wish from the mind entirely, until the mind could recall it only as well as any other dream.

She followed the steps exactly. The world around her practically vibrated at her effort, each movement so controlled it made the air sing. She would have been proud of her work – if he showed any sign of waking. Her heart pounded. Once more, she found the dream-wish, then his mind, and slowly, so slowly she feared losing control again, sweat trickling down the back of her neck, she pulled. But something locked them together. Something kept him trapped.

She stopped and gasped for air. When she'd wrapped him up in his greatest desire, he'd gone so smoothly, so quickly, it had been as if the wish had snapped over his mind. She'd thought it normal. She'd believed the reaction common.

She'd been wrong. He wasn't coming out.

She raised her hands, covering her mouth again. No. This couldn't be happening.

She turned on her heel and ran.

* * *

The next morning, Tony came down to the kitchen to find the house absolutely bustling. Steve had already finished making breakfast – Tony hadn’t realized so much time had passed between Steve kissing his forehead and him actually getting up – and the others were gathered around the table, cutting up pancakes or chowing down on scrambled eggs. Sam had gotten up to make seconds, since Hulk had three plates piled up next to him. Thor clattered his own third plate onto his own pile, Hulk grinning at the man at being ahead of him.

Steve looked up at him as he entered and grinned. An untouched plate of food sat beside him at an empty place at the table. Tony grinned and sat next to him. “Good morning,” Steve said as Tony sat, and Tony leaned over to kiss him. He could taste eggs and syrup in Steve’s mouth.

“Good morning,” he said, and felt happiness spark inside him, from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. He reached out to take Steve’s hand, only to find Steve reaching to do the same. Tony grinned like an idiot and wrapped his fingers around Steve’s. It was difficult to eat with his left hand, but by God, he managed it. Natasha rolled her eyes at the two of them. Clint pretended to barf up his scrambled eggs. Hulk threw a pancake at him, leaving Thor to declare that he would win their eating contest, since Hulk had forfeited some of his meal. Tony just shook his head. There was no way Sam was getting the second batch of food done in time.

“So, do you have any plans for today?” Steve asked, eating at an almost reasonable pace compared to their most gluttonous companions. Of course, he was eating with his dominant hand. As close to ambidextrous as Tony was, he was a bit slower with his left hand. Something that kept him from practicing more – nothing annoyed him more than going slow when his mind was racing forward.

“Yeah. I wanted to check on that girl, see if anything’s come up. When I brought her in, no one even knew who she was.”

That got everyone’s attention for a moment. “Wait. There wasn’t any ID on her?” Clint asked.

Tony shook his head. “Nothing. Just her business suit. She wouldn’t say anything but that ‘he made me do it’ thing.”

Steve frowned. “Do you want me to come with you?”

Tony looked at his plate, sighed, and shook his head. “I don’t know what she’s referring to. If it’s the worst-case scenario, then I don’t think it would be good for her to have a bunch of men showing up.”

“Then I’ll go,” Natasha said, with the tone of voice that said she would brook no arguments. Tony opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off. “We don’t know what happened to her, or if whatever was going on was finished when you picked her up. If whoever hurt her is coming back, then I don’t want you facing it by yourself.”

Steve nodded. “She’s got a point.”

Tony, however, was already nodding. “It’s a good idea. She might open up to you better than she did with me. Though I’m hoping it won’t be necessary.” There were nurses, therapists. Hopefully, they’d been able to at least figure out the woman’s name. From there, Tony would at least have a starting point to figuring out what had happened to her, even if she wasn’t willing to speak on it just yet.

Twenty minutes later saw him standing next to Natasha on the elevator, both of them heading to the garage. He grinned over at her. “So what do you think? How long until Clint learns Sam’s mother sent a new shipment of sweets?”

She smirked. “Quite a while, I’d suspect, since Sam’s hidden them in the meeting room.”

Tony laughed. The one room Clint avoided like the plague. Brilliant. “Tell me he didn’t just leave them lying out.”

“They’re actually sitting on Clint’s chair.”

Their laughter spilled out into the garage as they made their way to one of the less ritzy cars Tony owned and took off. The hospital wasn’t far away, but in a car in the middle of the day in New York City, the hospital might as well be in another town entirely. They sat back and relaxed during the stop-and-start of the busy city streets, talking about nothing – the weather, their training, the clean-up of the newly wrecked bank – and enjoyed a companionable silence otherwise. The breeze was almost hot despite the late April day, finally bad enough that Tony just rolled up the windows and blasted the AC. Natasha said nothing, but she turned her face momentarily into the fans, so Tony knew it had been getting to her, as well.

Another advantage of the filters was the lack of exhaust puffing into their faces, along with the slight reduction in noise. Count on New York to have nothing but irate drivers, even though everyone who was anyone knew the streets were off-limits unless you wanted a nice, long break from being able to get anything done. If Tony had been alone, he would have likely just used his suit to get the the hospital. Even with just Natasha, they could have just strolled in. But they’d gone on the unspoken rule that they would try to act like completely normal people. Not just for their own sake, since the media tended to congregate wherever they decided to breathe, but for their Jane Doe, who didn’t need the added attention.

It meant that, by the time they finally arrived and found a parking space, it was over an hour passed when they’d left. It made it all the more annoying to try to get to the reception counter, as visiting hours had been underway for an hour or so and everyone was intent on meandering through the halls.

By the time Tony finally got through the crowd – made worse by the fact that he was easily recognizable and pictures started flashing, though Nat took the hit for most of them, diving in between him and the cameras like the ballerina spy she was, it was past ten and they were both about ten seconds away from a meltdown.

“You are the _worst_ option for under the radar,” Natasha groaned. Tony grinned.

“But I’m the _best_ at getting us through a crowd faster,” he said, and Natasha had to agree with him. They made it up to the waiting area past the main lobbies, on their way to Section A, where the nurse’s stations were surrounded by curtained-off rooms for people with minor stays pending, when Tony saw the ‘W’ on the Waiting Area sign crash to the ground. He jumped at the clatter. Natasha gave him a look.

The A crashed, then the N. All that was left was “ITI G ROOM.” He sucked in a sharp breath, then walked up to the sign. He bent down to grab the loose letters – injured and handicapped people moved through this room, after all – only for the letters to disappear. His fingers clutched air, their tips scraping linoleum. His brows furrowed. He stood.

All the letters were back on the sign.

Natasha came up beside him. “Tony?”

He shook his head. Touched his temple. “No, it’s nothing.” He squinted at the sign. Nothing. It looked perfectly fine. What the hell?

“Mr. Stark?”

He and Nat turned to the sound of his name to find a nurse smiling at him from the entrance. “I’m glad to see you,” the nurse said, hugging a clipboard to her chest and pushing a stray lock of dyed blonde hair behind her ear. “We’ve had little success learning anything from your patient.” He followed her as she led them down the hall past the curtains. He didn’t bother correcting her on the woman being his patient; he was used to people assigning things to him that weren’t his, and it wasn’t something worth arguing about. “She insists on repeating that one sentence, though there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her scans.”

“Psychological?” Nat asked, taking up when he paused, staring at the sign informing them that they were entering Department B. The ‘D’ and ‘A’ tinked to the floor, skidding along the floor to nowhere. He stared at he sign. The word Department had turned into ‘ep rtment.’ He looked to the letters, then back to the sign. This time it didn’t surprise him to find the sign undamaged. He took a deep breath.

“It appears so,” the nurse said. She stopped before one of the first doors. “The police have come through, but they didn’t get anything more from her than any of ours.” The woman put a hand to her cheek. She looked no older than twenty, though she had to be older than that to already be working. “Whatever happened to her, it must have been horrible. There aren’t any wounds on her, but without anywhere to send her – well, we just didn’t know what to do.”

“Whatever her circumstances,” Tony said, “she likely isn’t safe in them. Go ahead and run the test you need, check her out again, have the therapist come through one more time – and I’m hoping your therapist is female?” At the nurse’s nod, he continued. “Until we figure out what’s happening, the moment you guys need the spare room, let me know. She can come to stay with us in the tower.”

Natasha nodded. “There’s no place safer. I don’t know that we’ll be as helpful to her as here, but at least she’ll be safe.”

The nurse nodded. “It’s a relief to hear she has someplace available, at least,” she said, “though I don’t know about letting her go with strangers, even if those strangers are the Avengers.” She looked from them to the door and back.

Tony smiled. “That’s good. We _are_ strangers to her, and things can get loud and rowdy at our place. It’s good to know she has a nurse like you watching out for her. For now, it’s just an option. Just in case.”

The nurse nodded. Tony waited for her to turn the knob and open the door. And frowned. The numbers on the door rearranged. No longer 113, they twisted and turned until they spelled out a less-than sign and a three – an online ‘heart.’

“I’ll have to check with my supervisors,” the nurse said, snapping Tony away from the letters. When he looked again, everything was once more in order. “For now, she’ll be happy enough with some visitors, I think.”

As soon as the door opened, Tony had to bite back a gasp. The woman sat against the headboard of the bed, arms wrapped around her knees, just as they’d been when he’d first found her. She sat in a hospital gown instead of her previous suit, her hair perfectly brushed and straightened about her face. She looked up and stared at him. And all around her, the letters on the clipboard and the numbers on her door all bounced out at once, swirled in an invisible eddy, and smashed into pieces on the floor.

“He made me do it,” she whispered.


	2. I'm Bad Behavior

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An enemy attacks, but Tony doesn't join the battle.

Alarms blared.

Steve cursed as Wanda raced inside the room. “Where’s Tony?” he asked. She looked at him wide-eyed. She looked as if she’d been given quite a fright. Steve’s lips thinned. When would Tony stop treating her like a bomb about to go off? “I take it the talk didn’t go well.”

“I’ll say,” Clint said, storming into the room with a scowl on his face. Steve just looked at him. “Oh, I went to fetch him, all right. The man’s sleeping. Wouldn’t wake up even when I shook him.”

“What? Wasn’t he just talking with Wanda?” Nat asked.

Clint shrugged. “Knowing him, he just cut her down and decided the room was perfect for a quick sleep once it was empty again.”

Steve cursed again. “All right, then we’re going to have to go without him.”

“You do know he’s our official liaison with the UN on this,” Nat said. “This is our first big mission since coming back. They’re not going to be happy.”

“He probably should have thought of that before he started sleeping in the middle of one of the conference rooms,” Clint said with a snort. He double-checked his arrows, then his bow. “I’m ready to go, Steve.” He turned to Wanda. “Hey, kid. You okay? Don’t let anything Tony said or did get to you.”

Wanda was silent. Steve paused in the act of checking his own equipment. “Are you all right? Do you want to sit this one out?”

She looked up at the information they’d been given, placed in perfect holographic rendering by Tony’s state-of-the-art technology. She read the first few lines, detailing the aggression of a single, tall man with psychic abilities, and blanched. “No,” she said, but her voice was shaky. “No. I have to come.”

Steve shared a look with Nat. She frowned deeply enough to show she didn’t like Wanda’s word choice, either, but they shrugged and left it for later.

Without Tony on the field, it was true that they needed another heavy hitter.

* * *

Just as quickly as the letters scattered over the floor, the room turned normal again. Tony stared around him, his breath still as concrete in his chest, and searched for some reason.

“Tony? What’s the matter?”

He looked at Nat, then back at the woman. Her big eyes stared right at him – right through him. He took a deep breath. “Can you tell me what he did?” he asked, ignoring Nat for the moment to speak with the woman doing the impossible things around him.

She shook her head. “He made me.”

“All right,” he said, holding up a placating hand. He blinked and watched the world turn negative, the colors switching in on themselves. Another blink and they turned right again. He looked to the nurse, to Nat, but both of them were watching him. As if they couldn’t see what he was seeing. He frowned. “All right,” he said again. There were only a few main differences between them. One – he’d been in the alleyway where she’d been sitting. Two – and this one he wasn’t certain that the nurse hadn’t also done – he’d touched her. It had been through his armor, so he didn’t know if it counted, but it was a tentative option.

The third, the most obvious one, couldn’t be accurate, since it would have come up at some previous moment. Speaking to her. Her therapists would have done the same, and likely her doctors and the police. One of them would have contacted the Avengers if they’d seen the strange things he’d been seeing.

The idea of touch being responsible was a bit weak, since there hadn’t been any skin-to-skin contact. So unless the cause was the alleyway, then the only other cause could be – her. For some reason, she’d chosen him to see her strange visions. Or perhaps it wasn’t a conscious choice at all – perhaps he’d just been the lucky guy to find her, and she’d ended up giving him these visions through sheer bad luck. That necessitated the next question – had he been the intended target? Or had she been waiting for someone else?

Either way, chances were high she wasn’t deliberately attacking anyone. While he couldn’t rule out the chance that she was faking, or that she had been the original attacker before something had gone haywire, chances were high that she was a victim of some sort.

Going on a hunch, he held out his hand for the nurse’s clipboard. “May I?” he asked.

She frowned. “There’s nothing on here but a different patient’s notes.”

He took a deep breath. “I need to see if that’s all that’s on there.”

The nurse’s brows drew low, but she slowly turned the clipboard around. Considering the dangers of patient-doctor confidentiality, it said a lot about her trust in him – in the Avengers. He scanned the clipboard. Most of the words were hazy, as if drawn in a dreamscape. The rest, however, were big and bold and literally jumped off the page.

_I just need to check_.

He blinked.

_It’ll be over soon._

He looked away. Grimaced. “All right. Thank you.”

The nurse flipped the clipboard back around and read it herself. From the way her eyes moved, there was a lot more on there than he’d seen. But of course there was; she was likely seeing those hazy letters, the words that he hadn’t been able to make out. He was seeing things. An attack? A random explosion of ability? A shield? A message?

He turned to Natasha. The woman stood with her feet apart, her gaze scanning over the room. She had to know something was off with him. Without knowing what, however, she simply stood ready for anything. “We need to get in touch with Medusa,” he said, his voice low. Natasha gave him a wide look before searching the room again.

“You think a mutant’s involved, after all?”

He looked at the woman on the hospital bed. She still stared straight into his soul. “Yeah.”

* * *

“No Iron Man?” the man above them all called, his accent so thick the words slurred together. He floated tall in the sky, his hands burning with his power. “What a shame.”

“Stark’s still not answering comms,” Sam said with gritted teeth. Considering he was doing little more than dodging giant, glowing hands, it was no wonder he was on edge.

Steve rolled to the side just as something crashed beside him. Their enemy fought with psychic energy, with powers that made the world rumble and tilt. The streets cracked. Wanda winced, her shields barely holding against the enemy’s assault. They needed someone else to hit the enemy hard while Wanda covered their backs. If Thor or Hulk were available, this wouldn’t be quite the headache it had turned into. Or, of course, if a certain party member of theirs could get the hell up from their impromptu nap.

“Hey,” someone said over their speakers, and for an instant, Steve froze. “Where’s Tony?”

He took a deep breath, barely dodging the slam of an almost unseen force, the man’s power manifesting in a blue-ish purple, different entirely from Wanda’s pink-red powers. The force of the attack sent wind splaying out in all directions. He squinted against it. “Sleeping. Where are you, War Machine?”

“Sleeping?” Rhodey’s voice said he didn’t believe Steve for a second. Wonderful. “Vision’s on his way. Keep the enemy occupied until he arrives.”

Despite the situation, Steve looked to Wanda. The young woman’s lips had pulled back into something like a grimace, her brows twisted as she thought of meeting the android again. Their reunion hadn’t been everything she’d hoped for.

Their enemy attacked, and Steve had to roll away. He hissed in a breath as something slammed into his side. Cars, already thrown far from the battlefield, clogging up one entrance to the street, the way they’d come, started exploding.

“Nat! Tell me those buildings are cleared!”

“They are,” she said. “Clint’s moved on to the scrapers just beyond you. I’m heading back.”

That was one thing, at least. Steve had to hand it to the UN. They made sure proper protocol was followed. Steve had to admit it was something he should have done, should have considered. UN officials, as soon as they’d assessed the threat, their concern had been getting people out of the area. Steve and the others had been put on meat shield duty, keeping the enemy from getting to the civilians. If they could keep it up long enough for Vision to arrive…

“All right, everyone!” Steve shouted, waving his arm to show a tactical retreat. “Surround the enemy! We have a game plan!”

Rhodey hadn’t said ‘we.’ The man wasn’t the type to ignore a battle, no matter that he was still injured and recovering. Which meant he could only be heading for one place.

If Rhodey wanted to waste his time dealing with Stark, he was welcome to it. Steve couldn’t let himself be distracted by such old feelings when they no longer had a place.

He gritted his teeth. Why the hell was he even letting himself think about this in the middle of a battlefield? He looked at Wanda again, her knees nearly buckling as she struggled to maintain her shield above them, allowing them a bit of maneuvering room. She’d caught three out of four attacks before news of Vision’s arrival hit her ears. Now she stopped only a fraction of those. Even tired, the sudden drop could only mean one thing. “Wanda! Head in the game!”

She howled and _shoved_ with her powers. Something pushed the giant hand about to swat him back. He looked up to see Wanda’s power crackle against the enemy’s face. The man turned his attention on Wanda.

Shit. This was the exact opposite of what they’d wanted to do. They couldn’t afford to let this battle leave the area. There were too many people in New York to get the entire city evacuated, and certainly not this quickly. They were lucky enough to get this portion of the city emptied. If it shot down the street, countless others would be embroiled in the battle. Wanda had to know that.

Steve ran to her, throwing himself and his shield in front of her as the enemy threw a barrage of concrete and steel into Wanda. He grunted at the impact, only to slam into Wanda’s shield. They skidded back several feet, bounced heavily against the side of a building, and stilled.

This was what happened when one let emotions onto a battlefield. He needed to remember to never put himself in such a position again. The return of his shield had been a personal promise to that effect. No more emotions. No more thinking about Tony when others’ lives were on the line.

No matter how much he wished things between him and Tony could be different, they were what they were. Period.

“Push back, people! Don’t let him pass!” Steve scraped himself up from Wanda and, shield up, moved forward.

* * *

It was definitely centered around the woman – whatever “it” was. They left the hall down which her room stayed, and in little time at all, the strange happenings Tony had witnessed had stopped altogether once more. He took a deep breath. “My concern is why I saw it happening and not you.”

“That’s my issue, as well,” Natasha said, putting a finger to her lip in thought. Tony looked around. They’d returned to the front lobby, and though a few faces in the crowd had changed, there was nothing much different – and certainly nothing out of the ordinary – from how it had appeared when they’d first entered the building. “I don’t see anyone after her for the moment, but whatever her powers may be, she may be trying to say that someone made her use them already.”

Tony’s lips thinned. There were enough people against the idea of mutants in the world that the chances of one being abused or manipulated were extremely high. He knew Medusa and Black Bolt would have done everything in their power to protect their people from such attacks, but, well. There was a reason law enforcement existed. “For now, I’m sending the scant information we have on this woman to Medusa. I’ll need Falcon to check and see if anyone claims to know her while we’re gone. The police should be informed, as well.”

Natasha grimaced. “It would be a lot easier if she could just tell us.”

“But she can’t,” Tony said, scratching his beard and shrugging. “Well, for now, the best we can do is try to protect her while we find out what’s going on. If she’s a mutant, Medusa might be able to pinpoint who she is a little better, now that we have a basic idea of her powers.” Natasha raised a brow. “All right, so we have no idea what her powers are. But I can describe what I saw. I don’t like leaving her here, but the nurse is right. Anyone could be this woman’s enemy, including us.”

“We could set up a watch,” Natasha said, grimacing at her own words. She hated trial-and-error, bait-and-catch traps. Too much room for mistakes, she always said.

“If we set up a watch, we might seem even scarier for her. Let’s let the police do their thing first. It’s standard procedure for them to try to figure out what’s happened to a Jane Doe, anyway. Now they’ll have some new questions for her, and in the meantime, they can watch over her while they’re here. Hospitals practically have a cop in every wing to begin with.” Tony would prefer something better, something more defensible. But to this Jane Doe, he and Natasha were strangers. They may be heroes, but this woman was scared and alone and hurting, and heroes were just strangers in weird suits. “I’ll come back as soon as Sam, Medusa, and the cops are finished.”

“Not alone, you won’t,” she said, and he sighed.

“You know, I’ve been a rich man since well before I was actually a man. I do know how to deal with being in danger.”

“And now you’re part of a team, and you’re going to get your butt kicked if you think for a second that you’re going to head out into a potentially dangerous situation alone,” she said. Tony held up his hands.

“All right, all right. Testy.”

She sniffed. “Watch it, rich boy. Or you’ll be eating the mat when we get home.”

* * *

Rhodey ran into the conference room. His suit whirred around him, the extra gears or whatever in the feet keeping him going with little more input than a twitch or two. Sometimes he hated how Tony babied his injuries. Sometimes he was too grateful for the help to care. “Tony!” He slapped the palm reader with his machine, even though Friday was already opening the door. “Unbelievable,” he said, eyes wide. “He’s actually sleeping.” He stomped over to the chair Tony lay splayed in. Lightly, he shook his friend. “Wake up. There’s a call. The newly-approved Avengers are out there, and all of you are gonna get chewed out if you don’t join them.”

No response. He frowned. Tony’s lips weren’t turned down low, nor his brows. No bad dreams, then, keeping him from waking. And Rhodey knew Tony had been getting the right amount of sleep – or, well, a good amount of sleep for Tony, at least. So what was going on?

“Friday?” he said, his voice hesitant.

“Yes, colonel?”

He straightened his shoulders at the name. “What’s going on with Tony?”

“The boss went to sleep during his talk with Miss Maximoff,” Friday said. Rhodey stiffened. “They asked for the meeting to be ‘off the record.’ I therefore cannot say what caused him to fall asleep. However, since the meeting, his REM and NREM have been irregular; he has spent almost the entire time since in REM sleep, yet he does not wake.”

Rhodey shook his head. He hadn’t understood much of that. Only the important parts. “So that witch did something to him,” he hissed.

“That is my supposition, as well, though I have no evidence. The boss doesn’t like that word, however. It holds negative connotations.”

“If she hurt Tony,” he said, “she’s gonna get my negative rocket boots up her ass.”

He turned from the room and stomped his way back to the door. “Good luck, colonel.”

He wasn’t the one who would need luck by the time this day was out.

* * *

“So you’ve never so much as heard of her?” Tony asked, frowning even deeper as he spoke. Medusa had come by to give her report face-to-face, and Tony had ushered her inside the instant he’d opened the door to see her. They stood now in the lobby, hardly ten steps into the building.

Medusa shook her head. Her hair curled out behind her. “There is no mutant on record with the ability to bend a person’s perceptions of the world during real-time. There’s one who can alter the world from their dreams. One who can arrive within others’ dreams. One who can make things seem to disappear. But nothing like what you describe.”

“So she’s not a known mutant. Could she have been hidden? A late bloomer or something?”

Medusa frowned. “We searched the world for any who had been cocooned after what had happened. Hiding them would have been dangerous, not just legally, but for the woman herself.” She frowned. “But… it is possible. And you say she’s gone through some sort of trauma?”

Tony shook his head. “We don’t know what happened, and I don’t think it’s my thing to discuss, if you’ll forgive me. For more information, you’ll have to see her yourself.”

Medusa nodded. “I will, of course. Thank you for notifying us, Iron Man.” Tony nodded, and nearly as soon as the woman had entered the building, there she was leaving it. Tony heard footsteps behind him and turned.

“Anything?” Steve asked. Tony shook his head. Steve crossed his arms and sighed. “So, if she is a mutant, she was never found. Whoever this man is she’s afraid of, he may likely be responsible for Medusa and Black Bolt not being aware of her existence.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too.” He waved Steve into the building, toward the kitchen. He was thirsty, and he figured the two of them could use some time to think this problem through. He went straight to the refrigerator when he got in the room. Steve obligingly sat in a barstool on the other side of the counter. Tony pulled out a packet of strawberries and a couple bananas, then grabbed up the ice tray. He set them all down before speaking. “Whatever’s going on with this girl, she’s either being targeted or has been targeted. Mutant hate, or no?”

Steve opened the package of strawberries and handed them over to be washed. “We can’t say for certain. Even people who hate mutants will use their powers to their own ends.”

Tony nodded. “Yeah.” He raised his voice to be heard over the sink. “My biggest concern is why she’s unable to say anything else. And, I suppose, what that last message might have meant.”

“Last message. You mean the ‘I just need to check. It’ll be over soon.’”

Tony nodded. “You got it. What the hell is she checking for? And what does it have to do with me?”

“She’s saying he made her do it, but maybe she hasn’t done ‘it’ yet.” Steve leaned forward. “Tony, I’m worried about you.”

Tony snorted and turned off the water. He gave the sopping strawberries over to Steve to pull off the leaves on the tops, popped one in his mouth, and said, “I think I can handle a couple weird visions, Steve.”

The blond just frowned. “Tony, I only just got you back. I can’t lost you all over again.”

Tony swallowed. “I don’t want to go back to that,” he admitted. He reached out, and like quicksilver, Steve caught his hand in his. “I’m not willing to give this up. But I can’t just leave her. Even if she’s attacking me or something.”

Steve rubbed his thumb over Tony’s knuckles, his gaze, as usual, parsing out the new scars from the old. “I know, Tony, and I wouldn’t ask you to. Just…” He sighed. “There has to be something I can do.”

Tony popped another strawberry in his mouth. Steve gave him a look. “What? I’m willing to share.” He leaned down and kissed Steve full on the lips, until those frown lines were finally gone and Steve was reaching up to pull Tony half on top of the counter.

“Ew! Get a room!”

Tony leaned back with a smirk. “They’re all my rooms, Clint.”

“So you have plenty to choose from,” he said, and plopped down on the sofa.

Steve shook his head and leaned back in his seat, forcing Tony to stand straight and return to the blender. “He got you there, Tony.”

“If I own all the rooms, then I choose which one I want to be in and what I want to do in them. And hey,” he said with a smirk, “what Clint doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Hurling sounds wafted from the sofa before Clint said, “if I see anything suspicious, I’m burning the place down.”

“You could always just clean,” Steve said, and Tony laughed. It always surprised him when Steve joined in on his shenanigans. For that, he added a dollop of cream to the smoothie before cutting the bananas and turning the thing on.

“With bleach. In my eyes.” Clint turned the volume up. Probably to drown out their victory high fives. Or the obnoxiously loud peck on the lips Tony gave Steve. Either one.

* * *

War Machine showed up fifteen minutes later than Vision, his suits thrusters on full despite Steve and the others giving the all-clear. “You needn’t have hurried, War Machine,” Steve said over the comms. He gestured Wanda over toward the cars piled high on the street. Slowly, she pulled each out from the pile and put them on the sides of the roads. The owners weren’t going to be happy with the loss of their cars, but it was better than the loss of their lives. “As soon as Vision showed up, the man ran off. Clint and Vision are chasing after him now.” Wanda had volunteered, but Vision was faster and Clint better with his aim.

“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Colonel Rhodes said. He landed and stomped up over to Wanda. Steve chased after him, hopping over rubble and kicking rocks to get to him. Wanda placed another car down, turned to Colonel Rhodes… and stood still.

Steve raced forward and grabbed War Machine’s arm. “What are you doing?”

Rhodes pushed off Steve’s arm and stalked forward. Wanda hunched low, but didn’t stand to fight. “Stand down,” Steve said, and moved in between War Machine and the Scarlet Witch. “She’s on your team now, whether you like her or not.”

Rhodes turned on him. Steve didn’t want to imagine what his expression inside that mask. “She’s not on my team. Not after this. She should be happy I haven’t called Ross on her yet.”

Steve’s jaw dropped at the threat. If Rhodes or Stark called Ross on any of them, they would be on the run again. And if they didn’t manage that in time, they would be back in the Raft. Ross had made himself very clear on the subject. He glared at the suit’s visor. “Back down now, colonel, and I’ll forget you said that.”

“I don’t care what you remember,” the man said. He shoved Steve, hard, and turned on Wanda. “Fix it. _Now!”_

“What the hell are you doing?” Falcon called down. He glided between War Machine and the Scarlet Witch and hovered. His little Redwing came to hover next to him, its gun at the ready. “You need to back up–”

“No,” Wanda said. Her voice was small, and shook. Her gaze, fixed on War Machine, was wide. It held something in it that made Steve’s breath still in his throat. “Don’t.” Her fists clenched. “He’s right.”

Steve stepped forward. Things slowed down around him. The cleared street of New York sounded too silent, too empty. His ears rang. There was only one reason why Colonel Rhodes would be this angry. Only one reason why he might abandon his calm and threaten Wanda. “Wanda. What did you do?”

She finally broke her gaze from the colonel’s visor and looked at him. His heart sank. “I used a spell on Stark.”


	3. Fever Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony sees more. And so do the other Avengers.

Tony stood over the woman’s bedside. She slept in the shaded colors of the midmorning light streaming through her window, her brows pulled low, her lips in a deep moue of a frown. Her fingers clutched at the blankets pulled up to her throat.

“She doesn’t look dangerous now,” Clint remarked, one hand on his hip as he stared at her. Natasha had been pulled by Sam; he’d needed her tiny fingers to help him put together a device to help discover this woman’s origins. Clint seemed only too happy to get away, since Thor and Hulk had once again taken over the TV. And, as Clint himself said, “it it’s only you or the boy in blue and not both, it’s almost bearable.”

Clint munched on vending machine crackers as he stared. “She doesn’t sleep well, huh?”

Tony looked around. The walls bled purple-pink ooze. Eyes stared at him from every corner. A tree branch tapped against the window closest to the bed. _I_ _t’ll be over soon,_ the branched tapped in perfect morse code. _It’ll be over soon._ His lips thinned. “Well, now we know she doesn’t need to be awake to send her messages.”

Clint cocked a brow his way. “We do?”

The sliming ooze slid across the hospital’s baseboards and leaked out along the edges of the floor. “Yeah. We do.”

_It’ll be over soon. It’ll be over soon._

The eyes in the corners of the room looked angry. Mean. As if they hated him. Yet there were no eyebrows to indicate such, no facial features of any kind to give him that sort of clue. Which meant the eyes reminded him of someone. The question was, who?

“So what are we gonna do?” Clint asked.

Tony frowned down at the woman. “Medusa’s searching for the girl’s origin herself, along with whoever might have hidden her from her and Black Bolt. Since this woman’s been officially classified as a mutant, she’s now considered an Inhuman. That means she’s under the Inhumans’ protection – and now recognized as one of theirs.”

“A target, then,” Clint said, and crunched down on another cracker.

“Pretty much.” He shifted where he stood before finally dragging a chair beside the bed. “We’ve been asked to watch out for her. So we’ll wait until she wakes up and see if she wants to come home with us. If not, we put a watch on her.”

“Not you,” Clint said without hesitation, giving him a significant look and pulling Tony’s chair’s back from the edge of the bed. “And what if she says she does want to go back to the mansion with us and she really is targeting you? I mean, for more than just these weird visions?”

Tony shrugged and leaned back in the uncomfortable chair so he could stretch his legs out and cross them. “Then we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Clint’s face made it clear what he thought of that response. He crunched loudly on his cracker, likely hoping to wake the woman and get the show on the road. “So you say you’re seeing things, right?” Tony nodded. “Like what?”

Tony looked at the eyes. Even though he’d moved, they still watched him. A bright hazel color, with carefully crafted eyelashes too long and thick to be anything other than feminine. _It’ll be over soon_ , the tree clicked against the glass, and Tony could almost hear a voice. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate.

“Tony? Tony!”

Clint grabbed his shoulder, and with a jolt, Tony jerked upright in his seat. Whatever tendrils of memory he’d been reaching for slipped through his fingers. He looked to Clint, ready to snap at him for breaking his concentration, only to see the wide-eyed stare Clint gave him. So he smiled and squeezed Clint’s hand. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I was just trying to remember where I’d seen some of these things before.” Despite having never seen that color slime before, it seemed to match the eyes. He didn’t understand why. “I see something sliding down the walls, and eyes. I also hear morse code,” he said, remembering to finally answer Clint’s question. His friend let him go, but his body remained tense. The man had even put his crackers down on the nightstand to free up both hands.

Instead of sitting down or relaxing with his food again, Clint leaned against a wall and crossed his arms. His fingers tapped against his arm. “I don’t see any of that, Tony. I really think she’s targeting you for something.”

Tony looked around again. _It’ll be over soon_. _It’ll be over soon._ “I don’t get that feeling from her,” he said, though that was about as far as he was able to explain it. This was so close to magic it made the hair on his arms stand on end. All he knew was that there was something, just off the edge of his memory, that seemed to be trying to tell him something. Whatever it was, Clint was not impressed with it.

They waited in silence for several minutes, Clint watching Tony and the woman as if they would break into battle at any moment, and Tony watching the eyes as if to stare hard enough would be to force the answers out of them. By the time the woman woke up, they were both hellishly tired and on edge.

She woke up with little more than a light flutter of lashes. Her fingers clenched tighter around the blankets, but her position didn’t otherwise change. Tony watched every minute detail, trying to find something in her that reminded him of those eyes, or that color, or that repetitive phrase. Yet he saw nothing, even when she turned her head to stare at him. “He made me do it,” she said, her voice quiet.

“Made you do what?” Clint asked, despite the fact that Tony had already told him she would say nothing else.

Tony dragged his legs back and leaned forward. “Hey. Good morning.” She continued to stare at him. “We’re friends of Medusa. You remember her, right? The lady with the crazy long hair?” Tony waggled his fingers behind his back in some horrible imitation. The woman nodded. “She’s been placed in charge of you, since you’re an Inhuman. Do you remember that?” Another nod. “She’s off trying to find where you come from. Until then, would you like to stay with us?”

The woman stared at him. And stared. And stared.

“She’s acting creepy,” Clint said.

Tony rolled his eyes. “She’s not deaf, Clint.”

The man shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Tony sighed. “It’s up to you,” he said. “This idiot is gonna be there, along with some unruly people. But we’ll look out for you. And it might be better than sitting in a hospital bed all day.” The woman just kept staring at him. Clint shifted against the wall, his body tense as the string of his bow.

The world splattered into reddish-pink, the colors of the slime of the walls bursting into bright lights. He flinched at the color, could see it reflected in the eyes around the room – in his own eyes, through his eyelids and into the cones in his pupils and down through his optic nerves into his brain. “I just need to check,” he heard. The woman’s voice. “It’ll all be over soon.”

He reared back. The chair clattered to the ground.

“Tony?!”

“What was that?” he asked. The woman kept staring at him. “What was that?!”

Clint grabbed his chest and pulled him back, and it was only then that Tony noticed how close to the bed he’d gotten. But despite his proximity and his volume, the woman simply continued to stare.

“She’s not going to target me,” Tony said, his lips pulled back to bare his teeth. He trembled where he stood. Clint’s arms felt like the only things keeping him from flying apart. “She’s already done it.”

Clint’s eyes widened. He turned to the woman lying innocuously in her hospital bed. She stared at them both. “He made me do it,” she said.

* * *

Steve stared over Tony’s prone form. War Machine – Colonel Rhodes – had carried his limp body up to his room, his steps careful as he dealt with his own physical limitations, unwilling to let any of them near the man. Not that Steve could blame him. They’d left Tony behind, had complained about his laziness instead of worrying about him. And all the time, Wanda had hidden what she’d done. Why? Did she think she could hide it?

Could she have, if Rhodes hadn’t come back?

Wanda followed them into the room, keeping a careful distance from Rhodes – from all of them, Steve and Sam and Natasha – as she did. Clint and Vision had lost the man they’d been battling and were coming back, still unaware of Wanda’s deception. She leaned against the door jamb, her gaze fixed on Tony, even though she couldn’t possibly see him through their bodies.

“How is he?” Steve asked.

A short moment, then, “his vitals look all right. For now.” Rhodes turned once more to Wanda. “Fix him.”

Wanda lifted her hands. Dropped them. Shook her head. It was the same act she’d given him out on the field, before Steve had ordered them to get the street cleared for civilians before taking this further. For some reason, everyone had listened to him. Maybe it had been the authority in his voice. Maybe he’d managed to hide the utter panic settling into his gut.

Maybe they’d complied because he hadn’t hidden it well at all.

“I can’t,” Wanda said now, just as she had then. Her hands twisted together. Rhodes’ fisted at his sides. “I tried. I can’t–”

“So you did something to him without knowing how to fix it?” Rhodes said. It did not sound like a question. It sounded like the last thing Wanda would hear before the second Civil War. Steve wasn’t certain which side he should take. Wanda was young, and clearly upset with what she’d done. But what had she done? Thrown Tony into a coma? Tried to kill him? Were either things that could be forgiven, even for someone as young as her?

“No!” She waved her hands some more. “I mean, I knew – I thought I knew–”

“What did you do?” Sam asked, cutting through them all, a voice of reason in the maelstrom. She looked at him and latched on.

“I just wanted to check,” she said. She looked at them all for an instant before turning back to Sam. “Just for a minute! I just – I needed to know if he was… a danger.”

Rhodes snarled. It crackled like ice through the suit’s speakers. “A danger? You mean like you?”

She flinched. “I’m not dangerous!” she shouted. But in that room, no one could break the silence that followed, and she hung her head. “I just needed to be sure. It was only supposed to take a second. He said–”

“He?” Rhodes left Tony’s side for the first time since they’d gone back to the tower. He stalked toward Wanda. “You played with Tony’s head with something someone else taught you? Something you didn’t even know?!”

Sam held out a hand, stopping Rhodes before he got into Wanda’s space. “Who?”

She looked up into Sam’s patient gaze. Her lips trembled. “The man we fought today.”

Steve’s breath left him in a rush. “Why,” he said, his throat tight, “did you let him teach you?”

* * *

After Tony’s reaction, Clint had been adamant about not accepting the woman into their home. Tony, on the other hand, had stood his ground. “She needs a place,” he said, ignoring Clint’s mini-rampage. “She has no one. Whatever’s happened, it’s already done. All we can do now is find out what it is and stop it. And hey, Clint? That would be easier if we had her close by to figure it out.”

Clint had ordered Tony to go ahead of him and relay the news. “All the news, Tony,” he said, in that weird way he had of somehow becoming serious for a short period of time. Tony had sighed and agreed.

His way home, however, had to be a long walk back, since he hadn’t brought his car or his suit. So he’d had over twenty minutes to try to figure out how to inform the others that the woman had already attacked him somehow, in a way he did not remember, and that she would be staying with them for the duration. When he finally arrived back and Steve, who’d been hovering by the door, asked him how it went, what did those twenty minutes of strategizing come up with? “Have I been acting weird or homicidal lately?”

Genius. Pure, unadulterated genius.

Steve stopped on his way down the hallway to give Tony one of the strangest looks of their acquaintance. “Uh. No?”

“Oh,” he said, still showing off that genius of his. “Good.”

Steve came close and leaned forward, lightly knocking foreheads with him. “What’s this about?”

Tony flailed. Like, actually flailed. His hand hit Steve’s chest, and he stopped. Nothing had ever been as reassuring as the feel of Steve’s broad shoulders, his wide chest, more of a shield than the one he carried, curved around Tony’s lean frame. Even with muscles honed from years of engineering work, somehow Steve made Tony look tiny and small by comparison. He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Steve. “The thing she says someone made her do. I think it was done to me.”

Steve’s arms, halfway around him already, squeezed tight. “What?”

Tony cleared his throat. “So, uh, whatever she might have done… against her will, Steve.”

Steve’s entire body had gone taut. Her arms were like iron bands around his body, as if he could keep Tony safe from something that had already happened. “It likely happened as soon as I flew overhead when we went after the Wrecking Crew. They may very well have been the distraction we thought they were. Maybe whatever she did is the very reason I found her on my scanners – if I ever did.” Steve pulled away enough to give Tony sight of his raised eyebrow. “Her visions. Who knows if I ever actually heard Friday’s voice, or if I ever actually found her with my scanners? You guys say you don’t see visions, but she herself might be one…” He sighed deeply. “I hate magic.”

“Isn’t there some way to find out?” Steve asked. He led Tony further inside, past the main lobby. The room, when it opened up, showed Hulk pawing around inside the refrigerator and Thor trying to cheat his way through the game while Hulk was distracted. Tony took a single look at the two of them and decide it wasn’t worth it. “Can’t you make something that would, I dunno, show the actual state of a room instead of the visions she shows you?”

Actually, that was an amazing idea. Tony grinned and smacked a loud kiss on Steve’s cheek. “Oh, you’re a doll! Yes, that would work splendidly! And I would have plenty of chances to test the machine out, because, uh, the woman’s gonna be living with us for a while?”

That made Steve freeze all over again. Sensing something, Thor stopped trying to secretly pummel Hulk’s character and turned to the two of them. “Is something the matter, friends?”

“No,” Tony said, at the same time that Steve gave him a vehement yes. Tony rolled his eyes. “You know she’s just a victim, Steve.”

“So are you,” he said, his voice serious. It made Tony pause. He didn’t know why hearing the words made him feel so relieved. It felt odd. Alien. Like a sudden crack in the wall. “I know you can handle yourself, Tony, but we don’t even know what we’re up against. Just… put yourself in my shoes for a second.”

And of course Tony wouldn’t want Steve placed in willful danger. But they were Avengers, and that was their daily routine. The only problem here was that this was something neither of them could fight. At least not yet. “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling for his blond. “I don’t think she’s trying to hurt me. I think she’s trying to tell me what she did. She agreed to come stay even after I lost it with her.”

Steve frowned, but he nodded. “If anything happens, I want you to tell me. Or the team. Somebody.” Steve’s hands squeezed around his arms, then he let go. “Since you’re the only one seeing these things, you’re the only one who can give us advance warning.” And he was the only known target. But Tony would be paranoid, too, if the target had been Steve. “One of us will stay near her at all times, and Friday will keep an eye on her. Right?”

“Of course,” Friday said, piping up as was her wont.

Right. Tony might have panicked back there in the hospital, but here? In his home, with his friends and family gathered around him? He would be just fine.

He leaned up for another kiss, and Steve obliged. With fervor. “I’d better get to work, huh?” he said, his lips moving against Steve’s. “That reality scanner won’t just make itself.”

Steve grinned. “Then you’d better get to it, genius.”

Tony laughed.

* * *

“Are you serious?” Sam asked, his voice little more than a breath. “And for that, you did this to him?”

Wanda’s eyes were so wide, it was almost odd how much water flowed in them. Out of them. “I’m sorry,” she said. It was just like with Lagos. Only this time, Steve didn’t know if he could call her _just a kid_. She was. That much was clear. Trusting a man she didn’t know, a man she found working magic in the park? Letting him teach her, guide her, hone her craft, ultimately for his own purposes? Using what he’d taught her on Tony, because she didn’t, couldn’t, trust him, and she thought Tony was a danger to her mind? Childish, infantile thoughts, easily manipulated. Gullible. Yet Steve couldn’t feel the desire to protect her. This time, it wasn’t some nameless faces on a news screen who were the targets of her foolishness. It was Tony. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“Hey,” Clint said, walking into the room. His body smelled of sweat and leather, his bow still on his back. He had to have come searching for them upon his return. Vision ghosted gently through the wall next to Clint, confirming Steve’s theory. The archer looked around at them all, then stared down at Tony. “Holy shit, is he seriously still asleep? Someone slap his lazy ass awake already.”

It sounded worse now that he knew the truth. Steve remembered his own dismissiveness, his desire to just get out to the battlefield and start saving lives again. To show the world what he could do. To show he didn’t need Tony’s babysitting. Rhodes rounded on Clint, but before he could take more than a single step, Wanda burst into sobs. For a moment, her tears stopped the world.

“What the hell?” Clint asked, the silence stained suddenly. Vision moved forward.

“There is something wrong with his sleeping pattern,” he said, and Wanda sobbed harder. Rhodes turned to her. Even through the helmet, the meaning was clear. _You don’t have the right to cry_. Wanda gulped back her tears, swallowed air. Coughed. Colonel Rhodes turned away. Sam touched her shoulder, but none of them offered comfort beyond that. They couldn’t. It felt like doing so would be to betray the man lying prone beside them.

“What’s going on?” Clint asked, at the same time that Vision stood straight with a jerk.

“Something is wrong,” he said, his words decisive. Vision had stayed with Tony when the rest of them had needed to run, or had been pulled away. Vision knew the changes that Tony had lived through, how he must have altered after what had happened at the airport. In Siberia. Vision knew Tony perhaps better than Steve did. Perhaps better than he ever had. Vision never spoke of it, but Steve wondered if Vision didn’t carry the memories of Jarvis inside him.

“Tell them,” Sam said. Like a parent telling their child to take responsibility for lying, or for trying to steal something. Wanda looked at him, then at Clint. At Vision. Steve could already see the man running calculations in his mind, reaching conclusions. Something told Steve the android had already figured it out.

“I d-did it,” she said. An explanation that wasn’t an explanation. Clint just looked at her with pulled brows, his quiver heavy on his shoulder, his leather loud in the tense silence around them.

“Mr. Stark is in a state of constant REM sleep,” Vision said, his voice quiet. “Tell me you did not send him into his nightmares.”

“I didn’t,” she said, then, at the disappointed look he gave her, she repeated, more vehemently, “I didn’t!”

“She placed Stark under a dream sequence,” Natasha said. Hearing it again made Steve’s stomach turn. “She wanted to know if his mind was safe for her or not.”

Vision closed down. Steve saw it happen. He watched the moment when Vision turned away from Wanda, not just physically but emotionally. The android ignored her as if she never was, his attentions turning once more to Tony. Clint, on the other hand, scrunched his face up like he’d sucked on a lemon. “What does that even mean? Mind stuff again?”

“It means she thought being around Tony would endanger her mind.” Rhodes growled, another crackling sound from the suit’s speakers. He rounded on her. “She thought he was going to infect her mind or some shit, based on what some two-bit villain told her.”

“Villain or long-lost genius?” Clint asked.

“It was the man we fought today, Clint,” Sam said. Rhodes looked about half a second from launching some missiles into Clint’s face. Steve wouldn’t have blamed him. Sam, on the other hand, seemed ready to launch himself between them all. “And he made a point of asking about Iron Man. For whatever reason, he needed Tony Stark out of the way.”

“He also ran when I came near,” Vision said, entering the conversation though he didn’t turn away from studying Tony. One hand reached out to push the bangs from Tony’s face. The sudden rush of jealousy left Steve reeling. “Perhaps he is afraid of technology. Or perhaps he is someone Mr. Stark and I know.”

That clinched it. Jarvis’ memories were in there somewhere.

“The reasons why can wait,” Rhodes said. He gestured Wanda over. “What did he teach you to do?”

She inched a step, but no more. Likely considering Rhodes an enemy. She would be right. But which side should Steve pick? “He taught me to put Stark under. Into his perfect world. I just needed to make the spell, and Stark would make the rest.” She cleared her throat. “Then he taught me to take him out of it. I – I asked him how I would know what Stark’s perfect world was, and he taught me how to check.” She covered her lips when she said this. Her eyes watered again, and more tears slipped down. They caught on her fingers and soaked them. “And I d-did, but I c-couldn’t pull him out.”

“What did it look like? A twenty-four seven Bar Mitzvah?” Clint looked around. “What? Like I’m wrong?”

Steve held out his hand. Rhodes nearly charged straight past it. “Watch it, Clint. You’re talking about a team member. One who’s just been attacked by one of our own, for no reason but that we don’t know him. Your words now make _you_ look like the two-bit villain.” Steve turned away from the man. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the sneer Natasha directed at Clint. For once, the archer kept his mouth shut. “This technique you learned to get him loose. Do you know why it didn’t work?”

Wanda shook her head, then nodded a second later. “I think – I think it needs to be stronger. Or maybe nothing can be strong enough. It’s – it’s easy to wake up, normally, right? You have a dream, and even if it’s nice, you wake up and go about your day. Even if someone puts you under, even if they make you fall asleep, you can wake up. But – Damon warned me that this spell would give people everything they want. Their greatest hopes. It would need a spell to bring them back. But – I tried. I used all my power. But it wasn’t enough. He… he _wants_ to stay there.” And she started crying again.

Tony? So desperate to live his dream that he would abandon this world?

“What could Stark possibly be lacking?” Clint asked, waving an arm around to indicate the tower. The money. The wealth and fame and prestige. Rhodes, however, looked like his armor was suddenly too heavy for him.

“Get him out,” he said. The inflection of his voice was flat. Wanda backed up that same inch. As if afraid.

“She just said she can’t,” Steve said, and watched Rhodes turn on him. He couldn’t blame the man. Steve didn’t have a good record of considering Tony’s safety in the past few years. But that didn’t mean he didn’t care. It was, in fact, proof he cared a little too much. “Our best bet is to find the man who’d taught her and–”

"And what? Ask him to pretty please bring Tony back to us?” Rhodes snapped. He had a point. Villains didn’t usually help those they’d targeted. Without Wanda, they were dead in the water.

“Is there another way to wake him up?” Sam asked, turning to Wanda. “Any way for us to, I don’t know, reach him somehow? Maybe remind him of reasons why he should come back?”

Wanda sniffed. “I… I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t think it will be that simple.”

“Why not?” Clint asked. “Just remind him of all the wealth he has here. His suit and his tower and his robot friends in his lab.”

She shook her head again. “You don’t understand. All the things he loves in this world are in the dream. And everything else he’s ever wanted. It’s the perfect world. Everything you want. It’s there.”

The room fell silent again. Everything Steve ever wanted? To be back in time with Bucky, to have Peggy be young and alive beside him. To get that dance. And – if this were a dream – to have Howard show off, maybe not his son, but a brother – Tony Stark. For him to be there, too. And the Howling Commandos, all healthy and hearty and alive. His mother. Perhaps his father would have gotten clean and come home, perhaps Steve would have been able to celebrate the end of the war.

Everything he’d ever wanted. It would be so impossibly hard to wake up.

“There has to be something,” Rhodes said. “Something the dream missed. Something that will tell him to come back. Tony wouldn’t want to stay there forever. Even if the dream is perfect, he prefers reality.”

“That’s just it,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper. She clutched her hands to her chest. “To him, the dream is real.”

Rhodes slammed his fist against the wall. The plaster burst beneath the metal, coated the gauntlet in dust.

“Then we need to find something to bring him back. Some way to let him know,” Sam said. He stepped forward, placed himself between them all. Just as Steve had known he would. “We need to make him remember. Make him think. To do that, we need to see just what his mind has cooked up. Wanda. Can you do that? Can you show us?”

It broke a thousand unspoken laws of privacy. But if they were to find something that could bring him back without risking it all on a villain’s idea of mercy, it was all they had.

Wanda nodded. Slowly, inching her way toward Rhodes, into his personal space, she came to stand before Tony. He still lay unmoving in the middle of his bed, eyelids fluttering but with no other sign of movement. When Wanda held out her hands, Rhodes grabbed them. Clint made a sound of outrage that was quickly stifled. From what Steve had seen from the corner of his eye, it had been Natasha who stopped him. “Anything funny,” Steve heard the colonel whisper, “and I won’t be the one leaving in an EMT this time.”

She gave him a watery, wide-eyed stare. The man didn’t flinch. She nodded. He let go, and she reached out again. Steve heard the whir of a repulsor as her magic seeped from her hands. “Hey,” Clint said again, and again he was ignored. Steve didn’t think the colonel would shoot Wanda for no reason. But if she’d done to Bucky what he’d done to Tony, Steve’s shield would be on his fist.

She made a long, sweeping movement over Tony’s head. Her power glitzed in a bright, reddish arc. She made several pulling motions, then, with one last sweep of her arm, her power flared. And they saw.


	4. The Watcher of The Eternal Flame

When Clint arrived with the woman in tow, every last Avenger was there to greet her. They each at least attempted to show a friendly force and not a united one – no ‘us versus her’ show, at least, but they were all in the main room, and each were already turned to the door as it opened. Clint stood just behind the woman, his voice carefully impassive as she looked around. She eyed each of them in turn, Hulk and Thor sitting on the sofa but for once not playing their game, Sam and Nat, sitting at the counter while Steve finished up a few quesadillas for all of them. And Tony, who stood beside Steve, handing him the ingredients he asked for and otherwise getting in the blond’s way.

She stared at Tony. He’d been the one to tell the others she was near; he’d seen the ingredients for the quesadillas suddenly churn together, the letters on the bag of cheese molding into another eye. It blinked at him even now. His first attempt at a perception dampener, as he’d chosen to call the device, had been a stupendous failure.

“He made me do it,” she said.

“I know,” Tony said, and he weaved his way around the counter and past his friends. Every single one of them tensed. “We all know that. They’re just freaking out. You know, like I did earlier in the hospital?” She simply watched him. Her eyes were nothing like those he’d seen on the walls in the hospital, yet the intensity in them was an exact mirror. Just like the walls around him now. Each reflected him, and her, and Clint. Perfectly. “It’s all right. We’re heroes, after all. We’re not going to get mad at you just because someone forced or manipulated you into doing something.”

The mirrored groaned, turned convex. Their shapes distorted slightly within it.

She looked over at the others. Steve came up to Tony’s side, put a hand on his shoulder, and smiled at her. “It’s all right,” he said. “We know you’re a victim, too. We’re just scared for our friend, is all.” The woman looked at Steve’s hand on Tony’s shoulder. Tony wasn’t certain, but he knew what he would be thinking. _Just friends?_

“Yeah. Here.” Nat came forward, one arm outstretched. “I’ll take you to your room. You get a whole floor. It’s like a guest floor, but you’re welcome to it as long as you’re here. Consider it yours.” She led the woman out of the room, away from the stares, the moment before it became awkward. She sent Tony a look before turning back to the woman. “We’ll get you settled in and if you want, you can eat quesadillas with us. Or alone. Or you can find something else. But I warn you, Steve’s quesadillas are really, really good.”

“I call first three,” Hulk said, holding up three fingers.

“Then I shall call the next four!” Thor said, and the usual bickering masked the women’s steps until they were out of the room.

The mirrored shifted. Shifted. Cracked. They burst outward, all around him. He hunkered low and covered his face. “Tony!” Hands encircled him. Shielded him. He leaned into the touch for a moment before reality crashed around him, as silent as the glass was loud. He looked into Steve’s eyes. There were no mirrors. There was no glass.

He huffed. “Steve, I need to find out what the hell she’s trying to tell me.”

* * *

Steve spun away. He couldn’t stand to watch another second. This? This was Tony’s secret dream? All of them living together, protecting him? Being a family?

Behind him, colors flashed as if on a television screen. For all intents and purposes, that was what it was. A sort of projector, not dissimilar to Tony’s own in his lab, hung above Tony’s chest. Above where his arc reactor had lain. Above his heart.

“What the hell is this?” Clint asked, but no one answered. They didn’t have to. It was obvious.

How long had Tony wanted this? Had he longed for all of them to be like this since the beginning? What must it have been like, to watch them all go their separate ways – to see them walk away? No. Steve thought to the nightmare that had been Ultron, to how tired and twisted and exhausted he’d been back then, hunting for a friend who refused to be found, watching Peggy slip further and further away. He remembered the party, how excited Tony had been to host it. How all of them had come together to drink and eat and talk. That small scene, that tiny glimmer through the looking glass, reminded him almost too strongly of those moments. Tony had snarked with them. Leaned back in his chair and relaxed. He’d never seen Tony so happy. Was that what Tony had really wanted? Back then? Those moments to last forever?

“We can use this,” Rhodes said, as if what he was seeing was nothing out of the normal. And for him, maybe it wasn’t. Rhodes knew Tony better than any of them. It was something Steve had never really thought of; where Tony was, there was Rhodes as his shadow. Wherever Rhodes stood, Tony backed his play. Or pushed him forward, usually down a more expedient, though less safe route. “I’m not in there,” he said. And he was right. Rhodes, the one person who was always by Tony’s side, wasn’t there. Why? If this was Tony’s perfect world, then of course Rhodes should be involved. Miss Potts, too. And… “And P… Spiderman isn’t there.” Rhodes straightened. “This is good. We can use this.” He glared at Wanda. “If you hurt him…”

“She won’t,” Steve said, but all his words did was turn Rhodes’ ire on him. And why not? Steve had taken Wanda’s side before. God, had Tony felt like this when he’d come to speak with Steve, his father’s pend in tow? Had he wanted this when he’d stood across from Steve at the airport? Wanting them to be close, to be friends, to live together like a family? Had that been in Tony’s heart when Steve had left him in Siberia?

No wonder. No wonder Rhodes hated him.

“If you cannot trust Captain Rogers’ word,” Vision said, “trust mine.” He stood over Tony’s body, another sort of armor to protect him. Steve thought he heard more of Jarvis in those words than Vision. Then again, he didn’t know either very well.

Rhodes stared at Vision for a long moment, then nodded and walked out. Steve could guess where he was going. He was going to get in touch with Spiderman, see if he could come down to help Tony. And he didn’t want them to know how to contact him or who he might be.

Steve looked to Wanda. Perhaps that was for the best.

Wanda bit her lip, her eyes luminous as she stared at the images she’d conjured from Tony’s mind. Steve could see them now – Tony sat at the kitchen counter, the countertops granite, the appliances all stainless steel. The walls were a bright splash of a neutral beige, but breaking it up were pictures so clashing it was clear several people had picked them all out. A bowl of fruit sat beside the fridge. A list of groceries sat half-full on the freezer door, stuck there with a Darth Vader magnet. The fake Steve turned, grinning, and handed Tony a quesadilla. Hulk peeked over Tony’s shoulder, frowning as he complained about having called the first three. Steve rolled his eyes and said, “if I followed yours and Thor’s demands, Tony would get nothing. You’ll each get one or two, and then seconds can be divvied according to who wants more.”

Thor sat at the counter. “Your desire for fairness does you credit, friend,” he said, sending a smug look Hulk’s way when Steve thanked him. Hulk growled. From what Steve – the real Steve – could see, Thor looked to be buttering him up. He hoped the fake him noticed. Then he pushed those thoughts from his head, because they had no place anywhere and served no purpose.

“I can’t believe this,” Clint said, the accusatory tone still there but muddled, now. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Of course it does, you idiot,” Nat said. She glared murder at him. Her arms, however, crossed before her. A defensive stance. Steve would never have thought to see it. “Anyone could see just how desperate Tony Stark is for validation. He’s been desperate for it since long before he broke procedure and declared himself Iron Man. Now let’s go. We need to get Pepper Potts, if Colonel Rhodes hasn’t contacted her already.” She led Clint out with a single hand on his back. The man looked at Tony until they were gone from the room.

As soon as they were gone, Steve looked back to the images. He saw the fake him put food down in front of Hulk and Thor, only to order them not to touch it. “We’ll wait for her,” he said, likely referencing the woman Steve didn’t recognize. The one with Wanda’s voice. “She needs to know she’s welcome, not intruding. And if she comes in to see everyone eating without her, she’ll think of herself as the latter.”

“We still don’t know what she did to Tony,” Hulk said, eyeing the food like, if he could just act quickly enough, no one would notice if he ate it. And wasn’t it just a kicker that, in Tony’s mind, Hulk was enough of a person to talk? Think? Have his own considerations, his own feelings? Was this how Tony thought of Hulk? Really? Was that why, when Tony had fallen from the wormhole, Hulk had instinctively moved to save him?

“Whatever it is, she didn’t mean to do it,” Steve said, though something around his eyes had hardened. He kept glancing worriedly at Tony, who fiddled with his quesadilla, but didn’t eat it. Tony kept staring at his watch, poking and prodding it, until finally Steve placed his hand over Tony’s. “Worrying about it right now won’t do anything. You can try again after dinner.”

“How am I supposed to find how to perceive reality when I’m the one trapped in this…” Tony waved a hand, nearly slapping Sam – a younger, more _nerdy_ looking Sam – in the face. He turned to apologize and caught the eyebrow lifted in his direction. Tony snorted. “Don’t give me that. You’re busy trying to find out where she even came from.”

“That’s just it, Tony,” he said, and thanked Steve for his own plate. “I did finish it. And do you know what I found when I ran her hospital information?” The young Sam paused for dramatic flourish, and Tony, humoring him, shook his head. “Nowhere.” Tony blinked. “Nowhere, Tony. She doesn’t even show up in the system. She’s a ghost.”

Tony shook his head again. “That doesn’t make sense. It worked on all of us. Even Hulk. Only Thor trumped it, and for obvious reasons.”

“Yeah. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

Tony stilled. And so did Steve. The real Steve.

“Wait.” He stepped forward. Vision didn’t move from his chosen post by Tony’s head, but Steve didn’t care. His eyes were for Tony, and for the world in his mind. “Wanda. What is that? What are they talking about?”

She shook her head. From the lack of confusion, he could only assume she’d been listening in to the conversation, as well. “I don’t know. Maybe Tony likes mysteries. Or the occult.”

“Mr. Stark has a high aversion to anything considered magical or supernatural,” Vision said, at the same time Steve said, “Tony hates magic.” The two shared a look. “It may be,” Vision said, his voice careful, as if speaking it out loud might destroy their chance, “that Mr. Stark is attempting, though subconsciously, to inform himself of his situation.”

Steve looked back. “Why wouldn’t Tony have Rhodes and Spiderman with him?” he asked.

Vision shifted slightly, until he was angled a bit more toward Tony. “It is very likely that those parts of his life, as they are already happy parts in this one, did not alter largely. If such is the case, then Colonel Rhodes likely has work with the military to attend to, and Spiderman is protecting his own corner of New York. Miss Potts is likely overseeing the company.”

To Steve, it seemed strange that Tony would set up a family with the other Avengers and then leave out those he’d already been close with. But Vision’s idea made sense. There’s been nothing to change in his interactions with previous family and friends. Though, Steve would be willing to bet that in this false world Tony had created, Rhodes would not be struggling with paralysis.

Seeing his deepest fantasy like this felt perverse. He didn’t want anyone to ever get inside his head like that. It had been bad enough to be shown his pain that once, when he’d been battling against Wanda and her brother. If there had been an audience, he didn’t think he would have been able to face the others.

He was about to turn away when he saw it. He’d tuned out the conversation, inane chatter made to try to ease the woman into the fold. Steve had sat down opposite Tony, everyone scrunched together around the counter instead of utilizing the table, likely because of the worry that etched itself onto each face. He saw himself reach out again. He thought it would be to stop Tony’s fidgeting, which had started up shortly after the woman had returned. But no. Instead his fingers wrapped around Tony’s, intertwined, and held fast. Tony looked at him and smiled. Steve smiled back.

He stumbled away from Tony’s bedside.

“Captain Rogers?”

He shook his head. Looked at Wanda, who stared at him with a gaze that said she’d seen it – had already seen it – had already known. He closed his eyes and ran from the room.

He didn’t pay attention to where he was going. He just raced down the halls, his eyes snapping open when he was away from the room. Everything looked hazy. With one hand, he followed the line of the wall to… he didn’t know where. Eventually he stopped. His heart pounded in his chest as if telling him to move, to keep running until his lungs burned. He pushed the heels of his palms against his eyes and slid to the floor.

The room he sat in was large, like others in this tower. In this tower that Tony imagined them all living in, even though the layout wasn’t the same as this one. It was a stretched room, rectangular, with light, abstract paintings in cool pastels. This room held tables spaced around the empty areas without paintings, each holding glass objects, vase-like sculptures that lent a sense of height to an otherwise wide and empty space. Tony may not have been much of a painter or sculptor, but when it came to interior design, he was an artist.

Somehow, seeing this room calmed him down. It looked like some sort of greeting room, as if to allow businessmen inside. Yet it was part of Tony’s home? He looked around again and took several deep breaths. It was as if Tony had extra space he didn’t know what to do with. That wasn’t surprising. Just how easily could one fill a skyscraper? Steve had sometimes felt hard pressed to fill his tiny apartment.

He thought about that. About the differences between them. They’d always seemed – well. Stark. Poor to rich, old to young, twentieth century to twenty-first. He remembered their first meeting, the confusion and shock at the knowledge of Tony Stark, son of Howard Stark, seated at the head of Howard’s enterprise. A self-proclaimed hero who had built himself a way to stand on the front lines. He remembered that confusion giving way to anger, one so strong it had felt like lava in his chest. He remembered his head becoming clear, that lava cooling to a hard rock, a bitter pang of loss and resentment for that loss that nevertheless turned to something shining. Something almost beautiful. He remembered the way that, just after having fought, they came together to save the helicarrier. He remembered his heart beating fast then, too, as he realized Stark’s commanding presence, the way he simply expected people to move when he told them, reminded him of someone else.

He’d found himself enamored. Which had been completely unacceptable; Tony was a man, and Steve had learned better than to stare at other men back when he’d been fourteen and had been beaten for it. Tony was Howard’s son and about fifty years his junior; when you grew up knowing someone’s father, it’s not exactly couth to date the son. And Tony was rich, and sophisticated, and they’d fought nearly as soon as they’d met. Round all of that together, and there was never a good reason to move forward.

There had only been one time when he’d considered doing so. One time, in those first few days. But when Tony had woken up and asked if anyone had kissed him, the feeling had faded to humiliation, then pure relief. There’d been no need for anything more. And they’d gone their separate ways.

What if they hadn’t?

He pulled one knee up and placed his arm on top of it. Perhaps this fantasy world of Tony’s was what he’d wished would have happened after their battle with the Chitauri. But it was something more than that, too. It was literally everything he could have ever wanted. Not just all of them living together, but all of them getting along. All of them worried about him. Clint likely thought that meant Tony wanted them all to orbit him, but Steve didn’t think that was right. They’d all looked like a family. And family took care of its own.

And Steve? There had been more than mere friendship in that touch. In other touches, now that he looked back on them. Was that what Tony had wanted from him? When they’d stood against one another in Siberia, faced with Steve’s lie and Hydra’s sin, and Steve had placed his shield between Tony and Bucky and said, “he’s my friend”? When Steve had made his choice – the choice he’d always made, a _right choice_ – but there had been no wrong choice – and stood against Tony and insinuated that they weren’t even friends, was this what Tony had wanted all along? Steve had thought Tony and Pepper had been an item. Had he been wrong? And if he’d been wrong about that, what else had he been wrong about? What else had Tony never said?

He heard short, staccato footsteps. He looked up as Natasha entered the room with him. Her steps were confident, as always, but something in her stance said something more. She took one look at him and sat down next to him, assuming the same position he had. He waited, but she didn’t say anything. Finally he sighed. “I take it Vision informed you of the… situation?”

“Sam, actually,” she said, and Steve jumped. Sam had been such a quiet, comforting presence in the room that Steve had hardly thought about it. He gritted his teeth. He was losing it. “Though I don’t think he knows it’s not one-sided.” He looked at her, only to find her gaze steady on him. “On Tony’s part.”

He shuddered. A full-body shudder, from top to bottom, head to toe. His head sunk until his forehead crested his knee. “Can you really say that?” he said. “There haven’t been many moments where we’ve actually gotten along.”

She snorted. “You can say that again.” She shifted slightly, until her body was tilted just slightly toward him. “Can you tell me why?”

That was just it. Every time they spoke to each other, an argument brewed just beneath their throats. They could hardly talk without fighting. When they tried more, it wasn’t just their words that clashed. He’d learned his lesson in Siberia. Personal attachments couldn’t happen. They were destruction and chaos. Bucky was all he could handle, and even he came with horrible consequences.

“We’re not compatible,” Steve said finally. Natasha snorted again.

“All right. Why aren’t you?” Steve opened his mouth to answer, but Natasha lifted her wrist – just her wrist – and he stopped cold. “Let me guess. You’re going to give me shallow answers like how you’re from two different worlds, or different times. But I’m talking about ideals. Where are they different? Perhaps you focus a little too much on freedom. Maybe he pays a little too much attention to accountability. But what really makes you two so different?”

Steve looked away. There were no windows in this room, but he could imagine what things would look like if there were. A wide, sweeping expanse of New York’s sky. It was filled now with more skyscrapers than before, and the air was thicker with gray, but it was still a sky filled with people and life and diversity. If he let himself think about it, then he would find himself wondering if Tony didn’t look out those wide walls of windows, not to look down on others, but to be reminded of all the world had? All the world was? Wasn’t Tony just as interested in keeping those people down there safe as Steve was? And if that was the case, then why the hell had they been fighting for so long?

“Maybe,” Natasha said, her keen gaze catching the hesitation within him, “the two of you were so obsessed with making the other agree with you that you weren’t listening to what the other had to say.”

Steve frowned. He stared at the walls, imagined the swirls of blue and green in the painting opposite him were clouds on the wind. The truth was, he could remember countless times when Tony had come to him to talk. He remembered being short with him, angry. Perhaps when Natasha said “you two,” what she meant was “you.” A single glance told him he was right. “It’s not all me,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper.

“Of course not. Stark is difficult to get along with at the best of times.” She stretched. The day had been long; they’d come back from a fight and headed straight into another kind of battlefield. The tension was starting to make his back – his enhanced, super-soldier back – ache. Nat had to be feeling it, too. “But the two of you have had a special level of bickering going on between the two of you. Like he’s testing you, and you keep failing, but he keeps trying, anyway.”

The accuracy momentarily stunned him. The swirling colors turned into something else entirely, until all he could see was swirling snow and a hand that couldn’t reach far enough. He closed his eyes and turned away.

Testing him. He didn’t know much about Tony, even now, after working on and off with him for years. Nonetheless, there had always been something in the man that Steve had found himself trusting. When push had come to shove, Tony had proven him wrong and made the sacrifice play, without hesitation. He’d done what was right. It had never been up for debate – Steve knew Tony always tried to do what was right. That was, perhaps, the man’s great tragedy. But to think that Tony might have been testing him, trying to find just how far he could go with Steve before Steve pushed him away in disgust – how many times, Steve wondered, had he done exactly that? He’d expected perfection from Tony, simply because he’d had high expectations. Making stupid decisions was something Steve was famous for. The only difference between him and Tony was that his stupid decisions had panned out.

Nat stood, brushed imaginary dirt off her armor, and smiled down at him. “Miss Potts is on the way, as I’m sure Spiderman will be soon. But I don’t think they’re the only ones Tony needs to pull him back.”

And with that parting shot, she walked away.

Steve understood what she was saying. Tony needed to know he was accepted here, in this world. And if he was imagining a relationship with Steve in that fantasy world, then the best one to give that to him was Steve. He just didn’t know if Tony would believe it, even if he heard it.

 _Make him believe it_.

He stood. He had no idea how to go about doing it, or if it was even appropriate to charge forward in this sort of situation. He’d seen something he had no right to see, something that Tony never would have shared willingly. But if it brought him back… if it woke him up, saved him from some neverending sleep…

He took a deep breath and hurried through the door.

* * *

Sam sat opposite Tony around a table in Tony’s lab. Tools and gadgets had been moved to pile on top of items on other tables to give them room to splay their notes all over the stainless steel surface. Evening had come and gone a few hours ago, but their lists sat on the table without any definite conclusion. “All right,” Sam said, rearranging the papers for the second time in five minutes. Their eyes were starting to glaze. “Once more.”

“If I have to recite what I’ve seen one more time, I’m going to explode.” Still, Tony ticked it all off on his fingers. “Numbers and letters rearranging themselves or falling. Pinkish ooze on the walls. Eyes in the corners of the room. Morse code branch. Mirrors twisting and breaking.” The deeper information had already been written down on the papers. Tony’s eyes were starting to hurt.

“Okay. We both know the metaphors for mirrors. Windows into the soul, yadda yadda.” Tony waved his hand in a ‘move on’ motion. They’d already covered that one several times. “You don’t recognize the eyes.” Another ‘move on’ gesture. A color not natural to anything I’ve seen outside of the aurora borealis or lava lamps,” Sam said, and chuckled at the look Tony sent him. “Okay, okay. Sorry. So it’s not a lava lamp message.” The kid grinned. Tony wadded up a paper and threw it at him. Sam ducked it with a laugh.

“Devolved to throwing things already?” Steve asked. He walked in with three small cups of coffee. Tony looked at the tiny size with a pout while Sam thanked Steve and accepted his. Steve shot an eyebrow at Tony, who snatched his up before that warning look could turn into its usual threat of just draining the cup altogether. He slurped noisily in revenge.

“We’ve got a list of everything Tony’s seen, from letters falling off of signs to the weird mirror destruction in the front lobby earlier today. But there’s just too many things it could be, and all of them are a little too Twilight Zone for our tastes.”

Steve picked up the thrown paper and sat down on the short side of the table, between the two of them. He put his own cup of coffee down and unwrinkled the thing. His brows drew together. “This is the signs thing, then?”

Tony leaned over to read. Steve helpfully tilted the paper toward him. “Yup. That’s the first thing I saw – the Waiting Room sign getting vandalised by an invisible delinquent.”

Steve scanned the page. “Wait. You saw these exact letters fall?”

“Yup.” Tony propped his head on his hand and yawned. This time when he drank from his cup, it was pure instinct. “And yes, we figured out what it spells.”

“What it spells is a name.” Steve put the paper down, only to reach for another. Sam helpfully handed him the next in the line-up – the falling letters that once again spelled out a name, the moving door numbers, and the dancing letters that crashed everywhere. Steve’s brows furrowed as he read. “Do we know anyone–”

“Already wracked my brain. Nobody.” Tony sipped some more of his coffee, only to look at the cup and scowl. Already half empty.

“We think it’s most likely the name of the woman herself,” Sam said, leaning back in his seat and looking up to the ceiling. No matter how he acted, his eyes had to be hurting, too. They’d been been straining, as if staring harder would make the jumbled mass of information make sense.

“So her name is Wanda,” he said, and put the second paper down. Sam flicked a finger toward the third, and Steve picked it up. He frowned. “What does this mean?”

“As far as we can tell,” Sam said, “it’s likely the last things Tony heard before she did… whatever she did to him.”

Steve looked to Tony, whose gaze was caught on the far wall, his coffee cup up to his lips but unsipped. Frozen. Steve grabbed Tony’s hand. “We’ll find out what happened and we’ll fix it,” he said. His voice sounded so certain. Tony wasn’t. He was a little more realistic. Or maybe fatalistic. He put his coffee down, careful to avoid the papers, and nudged the next one Steve’s way. ‘Second Encounter, Pg. 1’ was written on the top of the paper.

“Go ahead and look through it,” he said. “I need a break. I’m gonna work on this watch and see if I can get it working.”

“I’ll help,” Sam offered. “We can keep thinking it through while we work. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get a better idea of what it all means if we put it on the backburner for a while.”

Steve’s gaze was on the paper, but he hummed in agreement. “Do whatever you need to, Tony,” was all he said. As if Tony could do so with any amount of confidence when it might be exactly what Wanda’s manipulator had wanted him to do.

Tony stared at the watch. Even if he stopped her visions from reaching him, would it stop whatever she’d done to him? Had it already happened, and he simply couldn’t remember it? Was she even real?

Tony rubbed his eyes. First things first. If they couldn’t use her psionic energy or Inhuman energy or whatever to trace where she’d been before Tony found her, then they would just have to find out what was real and what wasn’t. Maybe it would show them the truth, or get them some answers. Maybe she’d been forced to overload her powers. Maybe she needed a break from them as much as they needed a break from figuring out what those powers were telling them. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Steve made a startled noise from behind them. Tony took a deep gulp of his coffee, only to have to tilt the cup way too far. He stared at the dregs left at the bottom of his cup and scowled. Nearly empty already?!

“Tony,” Steve said, his voice quiet. “These eyes. You said you don’t recognize them, but they seem angry to you?”

“You got it.”

“Could they be the eyes of the person who manipulated Wanda?”

“Probably.” Tony popped off the back of the watch and drained the last drops from his cup. He turned and eyes Steve’s untouched cup.

“Tony,” Steve said, and looked up. If he caught Tony in the act, he didn’t mention it. “I’m an artist. I can draw those eyes. One of us – or one of the other Avengers, maybe Carol – might recognize them. It’s not much, but–”

“Steve,” Tony breathed, “you’re a _genius_.” He hopped over to Steve’s side and planted a loud kiss on those grinning lips. “You’re right that it’s a long shot, but it could be even better than what you say. I might remember more once I see them on paper.”

“I’ll get my sketchpad once I’m done reading these,” Steve said, and pulled Tony down for another kiss. Sam chuckled and slid the watch across the table toward himself. It was a good call. If Tony had his way, they would be a while.


	5. All Your Favorite Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another of Tony's friends comes to bring him back.

Tony stared.

Steve stared.

Sam stared.

“They look like eyes,” Clint said, popping over their shoulders. Every one of them freaked.

Nat shoved him out of her way from behind and walked to the fridge. “That’s because they _are_ eyes, birdbrain.”

“Hey!” Clint caught himself on the table, nearly wrinkling Steve’s hard work and splashing Tony’s coffee. Tony glared murder at him. “So what’s with the eyes?”

“Tony saw them in one of Wanda’s visions,” Sam said, carefully moving the paper away from the spreading trickle of dark liquid.

“Wanda?” Clint looked over at the sound of someone entering. The woman stared at them all. She hadn’t said a word throughout dinner – not that they’d expected much, seeing as she only had five she could say – and had slipped away as soon as she’d finished eating. The entire time, Tony had done nothing more than stare at his food as it had congealed and turned rotten on his plate. Even after she’d left, the look of it remained, until he’d pushed it away in disgust. No wonder Steve had insisted on nothing more than a small coffee.

“We don’t know for sure,” Steve said, turning to the woman, as well. “Would your name happen to be Wanda?”

She looked over to Steve and blinked. “He made me do it,” she said.

“Wanda it is,” Tony muttered under his breath, then, “do you mind if we call you that? It’s better than having no name, or being called Jane Doe, don’t you think?”

She stood for several moments before nodding. She sat at the counter and looked around at the cupboards. Most were wood, but a couple were glass, and the spices and chinaware could be seen behind the doors. She swung her legs a bit.

Nat finished picking out her fruit and yogurt and came to sit beside Sam. She stared at he eyes for a moment. “It looks like someone concentrating on an attack.”

Tony nodded. “Yeah. Someone who really doesn’t like the person they’re about to hit.” He tilted his head. “Of course, I’ve racked up a lot of hate in my day. It could be anyone. Someone who lost their job to SI, someone who hates rich white guys, someone who holds a grudge against me making weapons. Someone against the Avengers, or maybe just Iron Man in particular. Someone who–”

“We get it, Tony. A lot of people want someone to blame, and you’re the easy target.” Sam leaned forward. “That’s just it. If we could somehow narrow down why they’re angry with you…”

“Then what?” Tony asked. “We can find out a why, but not a what…” He trailed off. His eyes widened, glittered with something. “No. You’re right. We can–”

“–start making some better, more educated guesses as to what that person made you do!” Sam said, finishing Tony’s thoughts for him. Steve watched the two of them with a smile. “If they hold a grudge against your company, then they may have made you make a bad PR stunt, or send out something defective.” The very thought of such made Tony pale.

“Or,” Clint said, sitting down beside Nat and officially taking up the rest of the space at the table, “if they’re upset you didn’t date them or something, they may have tried to put you in a compromising position, or stop you from, I dunno, getting it up or something.”

Steve sipped his coffee. “That hasn’t been a problem.”

Clint made a face. Tony burst out laughing. “You asked for it,” Nat said, and ate a piece of melon from her bowl.

Tony turned in his chair to face the woman. “Wanda?” She tilted her head, but didn’t turn completely. “Do you want to sit with us? Or get something to eat?” She pointed at the fruit. “Help yourself. We meant it when we said you should treat this as your home.”

She hesitated, but finally she got up and grabbed herself an apple. She bit into it, her bite small and dainty like Snow frickin’ White. Tony was completely unsurprised when the watch failed again, and he saw the apple turn to rot and fall from her hand. Somehow, despite being rotted, it rolled up to the foot of his chair. Great.

The rest of the fruit in the bowl rotted, as well, and a strange smell wafted from the fridge. Tony stood. “What are you trying to tell me? Please.”

Suddenly it was as if the walls themselves were rotting, turning to slime and running down to the floor. He watched in horror as blackness painted his vision, until it was all that surrounded him. A land of nothing. Emptiness. He looked around, turned toward the table – where the table was supposed to be – but all he saw was black. His heart pounded. His breath came short. He clutched his chest and stumbled back.

No air. No _anything_. He couldn’t breathe. Systems inoperable – of course they were, Jarvis couldn’t reach him here, no one could, he was alone and he was going to die–

He backed up into something, and just like that, everything burst back into color. He gasped, clutched his throat. His heart felt caught in it, so badly he had to bend over to get enough air into his lungs. He reached out blindly. “Steve.”

Someone grabbed his hand, then his shoulder. Someone else shored him up. “I’m here, Tony. I’m right here. You’re all right.” Tony made a sound. It was a sound he would never admit to, never, not even if someone threatened to take away his company. He turned into Steve’s embrace. The person shoring him up let him go, and he mumbled something that might have even been a thank you. Nat was the one to respond.

Steve rubbed his back and said useless, soothing words, but Tony continued to tremble in his arms. That was not a fear he had any business having. That darkness had reminded him of space. He’d gone to space. He loved it. He enjoyed every second of it. He and Sam would go nuts over everything; whenever he heard from the Guardians, he would go into paroxysms of nerdy joy. Space was never something he hated or feared. So why had he reacted like that? And what the hell had the message been?

Something was wrong. He clenched his fists in Steve’s t-shirt. This playing it nice and calm, letting things continue, helping this woman feel welcome. This wasn’t what he needed to focus on.

He tilted his head back and kissed Steve’s jaw. “I have to work.”

Steve rubbed their cheeks together. “I know.” Those strong hands gripped his arms tight for just a moment before letting go. Tony raced away. Thank everything, but no one, not even the woman, tried to stop him.

* * *

Pepper Potts always had this aura around her. As if the world was going to bend to her will, and she knew it enough to keep walking forward without hesitation. Each step held the same sharp clack of heels that Nat’s did, a presence that existed through sheer will. When she stepped through the hall and into the room, everything, every person, every light tuft of her seemed to turn to her and still. Waiting. “What’s happening?” she demanded. “Rhodes informed me that Tony’s been hurt. Why isn’t he in the hospital?”

“Because there’s nothing that can be done for him there.” Miss Potts turned to him. Her eyes narrowed. He could only imagine who she saw – the man who had left Tony alone to crawl back from Siberia. There could be no love lost between them. “Wanda’s trying to help him.”

“Miss Maximoff?” Her eyes narrowed further. Inwardly, Steve winced. Right. Of course there wouldn’t be any love lost there, either. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

There was something sharp in that gaze. St3eve had no doubt she knew more than she was letting on. This was a test. “Wanda used a – we don’t know what else to call it, other than a spell. A technique, perhaps? It forced Tony into his own mind – into what he would consider a perfect world.” Funny that it still included villains, battles, bigotry. As if he believed a world could have all of those and still be good. “She has another technique to bring him back out, but no matter how many times she tries, it doesn’t work.”

“In other words,” Miss Potts said, her heels clacking as she moved, heading unerringly for Tony’s room, “Tony is in a coma. A coma that has been forced on him.”

Steve winced. “In essence.”

And it had been done because Wanda had believed Tony a danger to _her_. And no one had caught it because everyone had seen how upset Wanda was and had assumed Tony had done something. And he hadn’t. Steve would give anything to go back and make himself pay more attention, to make himself care that Tony wasn’t waking up. What should have been so obvious – what _had_ been obvious to Colonel Rhodes – was Tony’s devotion to helping others. Through all their fights, Steve had never doubted that. Yet he’d believed Tony would sleep through an alarm? What had he been thinking? If Tony didn’t wake up, would he carry around this regret like he did after having failed to grab Bucky’s hand?

Pepper was the one to lead them to Tony, even though he didn’t know how she could know where he was. Perhaps there was some unspoken rule between Tony’s friends – when in doubt, take Tony to bed and check on him in the morning. Had they needed to make that rule before or after Afghanistan?

She stopped cold when she entered the room. Her gaze didn’t flicker once over the picture of the Avengers on his nightstand, as Steve’s had while he’d roamed these wide spaces waiting for something to happen. They didn’t glance at the paintings, mostly of the city skyline, that were interspersed with framed pictures from children that had Iron Man swooping around, the way his gaze had lingered over each one, the frames so extravagant they themselves looked like art. She didn’t care about the bottle of cologne sitting on top of his expensive dresser, the scent of which wafted softly from the bottle like some sort of lure. She didn’t even glance at Wanda, who stood with hands outstretched above Tony still, her hands working through their trembling as she tried over and over again to release Tony from her spell. Nothing mattered, nothing surprised her, save the still form on the bed and the display still risen above it. Her hand rose to her mouth. “What the hell is that?”

“We’ve been trying to see if there’s a way for us to interfere with Mr. Stark’s dream state.” Vision phased through the wall. He’d left for only a few minutes, presumably to find out who had entered the building, but Steve’s return to the room likely forced his return. Vision took his position as Tony’s shield seriously. “I do not like the breach of Mr. Stark’s privacy, either, but we may be able to insert ourselves through the cracks in the dream. That alone makes this worth it.”

Pepper looked to him. It was like the tension in her just slipped away. She nodded to Vision before turning back to the display. “What does that mean? How can you insert yourselves?”

Vision stepped closer, his own gaze dancing over the scene before them. Tony had retreated to his lab after – after whatever-it-was he’d seen. Whatever visions caught his gaze in his perfect dream world, they couldn’t see them. But they gave them an opportunity. “It seems as if Mr. Stark is attempting to warn himself of what has happened,” Vision said. “Subliminally, he is sending himself messages. If we could insert something more into those moments – memories of us, or of this place – then we could assist in bringing him back.”

She let that soak in. “And the chances of that working?”

“Remote.” Vision stood beside her. Together, they stared down at Tony. Steve felt like he shouldn’t be there. Like he had no right to be there. Yet he couldn’t make himself leave. “But we must try. Mr. Stark is doing everything he can to free himself. We must do the same.”

Pepper bit her lip. Nodded. “Can you find some way for him to hear me?”

“We can try,” Vision said. “Colonel Rhodes has made a few attempts, but has not yet been heard.”

Pepper’s face hardened. “I’ll get through to him.” She glared up at Wanda. “Put me through.”

As if it was something as simple as placing a call. As if doing it at any time would work, instead of their carefully cultivated attempts to reach him during the moments he’d seemed to see something that wasn’t there. Still, Wanda nodded and twisted her hands together. Her fingers curled into a fist. She gasped. “Go ahead,” she said, as she had when Rhodes had tried the same thing.

Pepper leaned forward until her fists rested on the bed. As if closer proximity could do something for her. Steve hoped it would. “Tony.” She waited a moment, expectant, but when nothing happened, she continued. “It’s Pepper. You need to wake up.” Nothing. Tony continued working in his shop, his gaze laser-focused, as it always was when he worked on a problem. Steve’s hopes sagged. Pepper, however, persisted. “Tony, listen up. Stark Industries may be my company now, but there are still papers you need to sign and fill out, and I have two meetings you’ve chosen to reschedule while you’ve been adjusting the tower for the other Avengers.” That was news to Steve. Tony had fixed this place up specifically for them? Less than a day ago, Steve would have thought that meant extra security, restricted access – but looking at the odd scene in front of him now, he felt only shame at the thought. Tony would never do that. The vision before them made that crystal clear. And yet, even after all the time they’d spent working together as a team, he would still have thought such things.

The display above Tony’s prone form shimmered for a moment. Steve saw Wanda bite her lip, clench her eyes shut, and curl her fingers in. Each digit shook.

“Tony!” Pepper said, her tiny fists pounding the bed. “Wake up!”

In the false lab, Tony’s cell phone rang.

They each sucked in a deep breath as one. All eyes were caught on the sight before them. The phone rang twice, three times. Four. Tony seemed oblivious to it, his gaze on the innards of his watch, his fingers curled around a pair of tweezers as he maneuvered something into place. Finally, he sighed and sat back. The phone rang a sixth time. “Boss,” Friday said, and Tony looked up blearily, as if he’d forgotten where he was. “Miss Potts is attempting to reach you.”

Tony blinked a few times. The phone rang again. He looked over and touched the screen, unlocking it. Slowly, he brought the phone to his ear. “Pep?”

A loud gust of a sigh broke over the tinny speakers of the phone. “Tony. I’ve been trying to contact you for hours!”

The voice hadn’t been the Pepper standing over Tony’s bedside. She had opened her mouth to respond, but she hadn’t yet spoken. Her fists clenched on the bed. Vision stepped forward and placed his own over hers.

Tony, meanwhile, looked around. “Friday, what time is it?” he asked.

“Four forty-six am,” Friday answered, just as Pepper, her voice coming in clear despite being nothing more than a sound on a cell phone speaker, said, “nearly five in the morning.”

“What are you doing up?” he asked. He blinked one before yawning. His fingers slid along the top of the table until they met with the back of the watch. “You can’t tell me you need two hours to get ready for work. You would never have been able to handle being my assistant.”

“I’ve been up all night preparing to field the volley of insanity about to ensue now that you’ve adopted an Inhuman,” she said as Tony popped the back of the watch back on the machine. He messed with something on the side of the thing during the short silence, the Pepper on the phone likely waiting for some sort of response.

“Tony, you’re dreaming,” the real Pepper said, her voice authoritative. Steve could make out the tremble in her limbs, but her voice was clear and calm. “I need you to wake up.”

If Tony heard her voice, he did not respond. He did, however, look askance at the phone after a few more moments. “Aren’t you going to rip me a new one, then?” he asked. For a moment, Steve was confused. Then he remembered that the last thing Tony had heard was Pepper berating him for the unknown woman with the Avengers in his false world, and his lips pursed.

“No,” Pepper sighed, “I’m not. I’m just trying to contain this, which means I need actual information. You _are_ going to give me that much, aren’t you?”

Tony cleared his throat. “Yeah. Sorry. I was so busy thinking about...” His gaze drifted down to the watch. “I should have notified you. Of course the board is going to freak out about this.”

She snorted. “We can make this into another good PR thing, even talk about how the company wants to market the ideals of equality and peace and all that jazz. The board and our investors will eat it up; we all know those kinds of campaigns are good for companies, and you being you – being Iron Man – certainly helps the authenticity.”

“Because it _is_ authentic,” Tony said, his thumb running over the edges of the watch. His fingers tapped on the table. Steve, Vision, and Pepper all watched, the latter no longer attempting to get in touch with Tony, but just listening. Steve thought he saw tears in her eyes. “This woman’s been hurt, Pep. She needs help.”

“I know,” the woman on the other end of the phone said, and the woman beside Steve, eyes wide on the display, murmured the words at the same time. Steve’s heart squeezed. He couldn’t help but wonder if this woman, the one Tony had taken to calling Wanda, wasn’t some manifestation of the young woman leaning hunched and shaking over Tony’s body. Was this how Tony saw Wanda? A woman trapped in a single moment, unable to speak her own needs, alone and afraid? “Just give me something to throw to the board.”

“Tell them she needs help. Tell them I’m an Avenger, and that means protecting _everyone_ , not just humans. Tell them whatever the hell you want. She’s alone, Pep.” Tony cleared his throat. He wrapped the watch around his wrist. “She’s alone, and if she knows what she did, she isn’t even able to tell us. Whatever happened to her, it’s bad.”

“Are you safe?” Pepper asked. Tony clicked on one of the knobs on the watch. Twisted another. He stared at the face with the gaze of a man trying to decode something.

“Probably,” he said. “And if I’m not, the others will come for me.”

Pepper sighed. “All right. I’ll handle it. Tony?” Tony made a soft humming sound. “Be careful.”

“Me? Always.” Pepper made a very unladylike pfft-ing sound, making Tony laugh. She gave him a final farewell and hung up. Tony ended the call and tossed the phone to the side. “All right, Friday. Ready for another test.”

“Video and audio recording ready, boss.”

Tony looked around one more time, taking in the room. His eyes lingered on empty expanses of wall, and Steve realized the man must be seeing things in his dreamscape again. He hoped Tony was figuring something out. Maybe Pepper had gotten through to him somehow, after all? Steve nearly told her to try again, but then Tony pressed a button on the watch and froze.

Had something finally worked?

* * *

Tony had gone over the calculations over and over again. Thanks to their multiple excursions through space, through dimensions, and through time, he could plot the basics of an algorithm to be able to differentiate different places and dimensions and years. That had been the easy part. Making sure all of that was real had been the big question.

In reality, there were few ways to test… well, reality. One’s perception was limited to one’s senses, and one’s senses could get a little screwy. Optical illusions were just one of many ways in which one’s perceptions could be easily deceived. So how, then, to ensure that what one senses is real? He’d struggled with that idea all night, refusing to go to bed. The only thing that helped him was the knowledge that the woman, Wanda, wasn’t resting in her room, either. If she had been, he wouldn’t have been able to watch the walls slowly turn into bricks or hear Ella Fitzgerald’s “Dream A Little Dream Of Me” repeated over and over again all night. He’d told Pepper he’d been too engrossed in his work to hear her call, but in reality, he’d simply been unable to hear nearly anything over that song on constant repeat. Only Friday’s near-shout had managed to capture his attention.

The best he’d been able to do, even with Sam’s input before the younger man had headed to bed, was make the watch act as his eyes and ears. It could ping an area to check if anything solid was near. It could sample the air through the filter in the left side to tell him the scents the air should be carrying. It could then dilute this information into a readout that would, in turn, slip a tiny needle into his wrist through the back of the watch. Said needle would contain slight amounts of chemicals Hulk had read out from Bruce’s knowledge that should help switch off whatever was messing with his occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes.

In other words, the watch should be able to differentiate what was real and what wasn’t, and then help him do the same.

Which all sounded just swell, but despite the math making sense, it didn’t work. Whenever Tony felt the slight prick of the needle, nothing changed. The music kept playing, the walls kept piling up brick after brick, and sometimes DUM-E’s beeping took on that damned Morse Code again.

_Say nighty-night and kiss me. Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me. While I’m alone and as blue as can be, dream a little dream of me._

He looked down at the watch. He hadn’t found issues with the math so much as likely issues with the exact intake of the chemicals. Hulk had laid out the necessities for a man of his age, weight, and muscle mass, but had neglected to mention – something Tony had only learned when he’d decided he needed to read up on this himself – that he was cutting Tony some serious slack because of the medical condition of, oh, having an arc reactor in his chest. Yes, he should take lighter doses because of his weaker heart. But Bruce had been lenient in that dosage. Lenient enough that the visions Wanda sent him were still able to dance across his eyes and pound in his ears, which was the exact opposite of what Tony wanted. He needed to be able to tell what was real and what wasn’t. What if he’d been seeing or hearing something real enough for him to miss, even though it was a clue? What if he’d already done something awful and couldn’t even tell because things seemed normal around him? What if what he’d been forced to do was to kill his friends, to kill Steve, and he only saw them with him because that was what she was making him see?

_Stars fading but I linger on, dear, still craving your kiss._

Okay, so that was one a bit far-fetched. He still saw his friends when she wasn’t around, so that couldn’t be it. (He hoped, he hoped, he hoped.) Still, it stood to reason that the only way to be sure of what was an illusion was to be sure of what was reality. Which meant he had to get this stupid machine to work.

_I’m longing to linger ‘til dawn, dear. Just saying this._

His fingers played along the face of the watch. _Just do it, Stark,_ he told himself, and pressed down on the face, starting the machine up. Someone tapped on the glass partition by his lab. He looked over just as the needle pressed into his flesh, only to see Steve in sweatpants and no top – a heavenly sight at any point in time – knocking on the glass. “Tony?” he called. “Come to bed for now.”

_Sweet dreams ‘til sunbeams find you, sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you. But in your dreams, whatever they may be, dream a little dream of me._

The world blacked out.


	6. Guard Dog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rhodey and Peter comes to Tony's rescue.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the entire world going black on him was how he found himself lying down when he’d been sitting in his chair. It was the stupidest thing to focus on, but it demanded all of his attention. He’d been certain he’d been sitting. It was one of few things he could have counted on amidst all the insanity happening around him. That – and Steve. Steve had been just outside his lab door, looking at him with tired blue eyes, his bronze chest unclothed, his feet bare. Adorable and ridiculous, walking around the tower in his underclothes. A beautiful, insane man who had come to fetch him in the early morning because he’d failed to think about how worried Steve would be while he worked.

“Steve?” he called out, almost surprised to hear his own voice. He looked down and saw himself. His hand lifted when he ordered it to, though it touched nothing. He touched beneath him, but though he was certain he was lying down on something, he couldn’t tell what.

Was he unconscious? Had something happened to him? The last thing he remembered was the press of the needle in his wrist and the sight of Steve. He didn’t feel as if time had passed, but maybe it had? Maybe he’d lost hours of time, and the needle had had unintended consequences. For a short instant, panic engulfed him. But he wasn’t blind. If he was blind, he wouldn’t be able to see his body. And he wasn’t deaf, or else he wouldn’t be able to hear himself speak. Despite the fact that he heard nothing else – not DUM-E or the other bots, not Friday or Steve or the other Avengers, not the beeps and whirs and hums of his computers and equipment.

Okay. So he could still see _something_ – himself – and he could still hear _something_ – himself. Which meant he wasn’t experiencing anything too horrible or permanent. (Hopefully.) His measurements had been exact; messing with the chemical content wasn’t something to be done lightly. He wasn’t foolish enough to want to risk turning into some brain-warped version of the Hulk.

So. List the possibilities. Possibility one: He’d overdosed himself. But overdosing on the concoction of chemicals, of norepinephrine and acetylcholine and a host of other endorphins, would have given him anxiety, irritation, perhaps, with his weakened heart, a rapid or unstable heartbeat and difficulty breathing. It wouldn’t have led to something like this.

Possibility two: Wanda, or the person who had controlled her, had made some sort of contingency for the possibility of him trying to escape her visions, and had made this one to counteract his attempts. It would leave him vulnerable and virtually useless; he couldn’t find the floor, let alone anything to help himself. If someone wanted to attack him, or to keep him from stopping whatever it was he was to be forced to do, this was certainly the best way to go about it. But he’d been working on this watch for quite a while, and had been helping Wanda for quite a while, and he hadn’t had this happen to him before this moment. So either he’d gotten the formula right, or…

Well. That brought him to possibility number three: the chemical concoction had worked.

That was the one he didn’t want to think about. He would much prefer the thought of Wanda being forced to take away his cognizance of the world around him, or for the person who’d used her to come back to attack him, or for whatever it was that he’d done to have not actually happened yet and for _this_ to be what Wanda had been warning him about this whole time. But her words, the signs, had all hinted at the event having already taken place. And perhaps it had. Perhaps this entire thing had been a horrible dreamscape, and that one moment in which he’d seen nothing but endless black, the empty vastness of space that had, for some inexplicable reason, terrified him, meant that he’d been in this condition this entire time. Maybe he was back in that hellish dimension with Ultron, trapped and alone and only able to hear his friends’ voices. Perhaps he was dying, and had been dying for minutes, and just like “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” he’d imagined the entire thing, his time with Steve and the other Avengers and even with Wanda and Medusa, in the seconds or minutes before he died.

The idea made his breath short in his chest. If he’d given any credence to possibility number one, the credence would have flown out the window the moment his heart started pounding its way into his throat. That was a panic response. That was what he should have been feeling if he’d overdosed himself. So good news: he hadn’t overdosed himself. Not that he’d thought he had. Steve would have been so upset with him.

“So it’s number two or number three,” he said, unable to stand the silence any longer. He shivered at the sound of his voice. It seemed too loud, too big. The second option didn’t seem to make much sense. How would someone have gotten to his lab? It was in the middle of his tower – of the mansion. How could anyone reach it without getting caught? Why would Wanda do this to him? It didn’t give him any answers. Yet the fact that he was still alive meant he wasn’t alone drifting in space – an idea that brought the panic back to the forefront.

Okay. Logic. Logic dictated that something was wrong. But what? For the past couple of days, he’d been in a position where reality was something he couldn’t trust in. He’d found himself seeing walls with eyes on them and letters dance on pages and trees tap out secret messages.

_I just need to check. It’ll be over soon._

The fact that he was hearing them over and over again meant he’d heard them. That meant it had likely already happened – _whatever it was_. So whatever had happened, he’d been unknowingly dealing with the aftermath ever since. But though he and Sam and Steve had all tried to figure out what that aftermath might entail, none of them had come up with anything.

Then again. He looked around at the all-encompassing darkness with a grimace. The worst connotation for this scene was that the concoction had worked perfectly and this was all that was left. Whether he was dying, in a coma, or something else, the eternal blackness wasn’t a hopeful answer. But as he thought again about every hint he’d been given, he couldn’t help but watch pieces fall into place. The words, hinting at something already completed. The eyes he couldn’t recognize, that he’d likely seen as he’d been manipulated. The mirrors, twisting in on themselves, perverting what he saw. The blackness. The song.

If he wasn’t dead – if he wasn’t dying – then he was hallucinating. Everything.

That was why the entire world kept shattering or going dark. That was why the walls were always changing, blocking him off or oozing around him. It was why everything he heard reminded him of those last words – why he heard Fitzgerald warning him about dreams. Exactly which parts were pure dream and which had their basis in reality? When had this started? When he’d first seen the woman lying in the alleyway? Or some time before?

No. He could be overexaggeratng. There could be another explanation. He looked around at the emptiness before him and begged himself to be dreaming. He didn’t, after all, know why the ooze on the walls had been the color of alien snot, or why the letters on the walls had swirled around him as if in a dance when he’d first entered Wanda’s hospital room. It could mean something else. It could mean anything.

But he’d used the watch countless times, and it hadn’t made him black out or given him this sort of vision. It had done nothing but force him to wait until the chemicals left his system. This time, with him altering the chemicals to match more in line with what he knew of his own biology – information he’d had to learn the instant he’d found himself with a car battery… no. Had that… the arc reactor. He’d needed to know it all to properly fit the arc reactor into his chest.

He grabbed his head. What had that been? The car battery. He remembered being in Afghanistan. He remembered Yinsen. But he didn’t… why did he think of a car battery? He’d never thought of it before, yet somehow it seemed obvious to him now. Why?

“Tony?”

“Mr. Stark?”

He looked up. Voices. They weren’t his, yet they echoed in this dark, empty, endless chamber. He searched, but there was no light, no other visible form besides his own. Yet he could hear them, as plain as day. As if they were standing right next to him. “Rhodey? Peter?”

He heard Rhodey clear his throat. “Yeah. It’s War Machine and Spiderman. We’re here.”

They hadn’t been in the tower last he’d heard. How much time had passed? Had something happened while he’d been trapped in nothingness? “Is Steve with you? Is he all right?”

There was a long pause. “Steve’s here. He’s fine.”

He frowned. Rhodey had hesitated for too long. “He’s not, is he?”

A shorter wait, and then, blessedly, Steve. “I’m here.” His voice was shaky, low. He had to be terrified. Tony had gone away again. “I’m all right.”

“I’m sorry,” Tony said. “I know you were worried. I should have paid more attention to what you were saying.” He looked around, but he still couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t see Steve. He looked down at his chest. The arc reactor was there, muted beneath his shirt, but the light didn’t penetrate anything the way it should have. “Do you know what’s happened? Where am I now?”

Tony heard Steve’s sharp intake of breath before Rhodey spoke. “As far as we can see, you’re still in your lab. But you’re not.”

Warning bells rang in Tony’s head. He’d thought it was odd when Pepper had called him in the middle of the morning. Pepper would have slept her usual shift, as usual, then gone in to handle the blowout before coming to the tower and lambasting him there, usually from around ten to noon. So why had she called him, only to get some basic information before letting it go and hanging up? She hadn’t even threatened to speak about it more in-depth later. Something had been up with her.

“Rhodey,” he said, the name coming out slowly, “What’s happened?”

He heard nothing but silence. He sucked in another deep breath. Had he scared away the voice in his head? Or had it been real? How could he know? He closed his eyes. If it wasn’t real, then hearing Rhodey meant he was trying to tell himself something from someone he trusts. Someone who, though he acted like he brooked about as much nonsense from Tony as Pepper, usually let Tony have free reign, so long as he was kept informed. Had Tony done something without telling anyone? Had he done something foolish to himself, gotten himself hurt? Rhodey was more overprotective sometimes than even Steve.

“You didn’t hear any of that, did you?” Rhodey asked, and Tony cocked his head. Rhodey had been speaking?

“No. I didn’t.”

A deep sigh, and then Peter was talking. “Mr. Stark. Can you remember when we first met?”

Tony blinked, caught off-guard by the question. Rhodey made an exclamation of a sound, as if surprised but encouraging. He opened his mouth to answer the kid’s question, then paused. He wasn’t sure. He remembered meeting up with Spiderman, back when he and Steve had been on the outs. He remembered fighting with him, joking with him – being told off by him. He thought back further and frowned. “I saw you. On youtube.”

“That’s right,” Peter said, sounding excited. He also sounded slightly muffled – the way he did when he wore his mask. Why was he wearing his mask? Why had Rhodey introduced himself and Peter as their aliases? What was going on? Was everyone in a fight? Was… was Tony fighting them? “Do you remember when we first met face to face?”

The answer seemed like it should be in his head, yet he couldn’t reach it. His heart pounded. His hands shook. Why the hell couldn’t he remember? What exactly had that woman done to him? “I… I remember… food? Bad food?”

Peter crowed. “Yes! Aunt May’s walnut meatloaf!”

“Walnut meatloaf? Sounds terrible.” Peter laughed, yet Tony was still confused. He could remember that. A taste, like nuts were stuffed into a McDonald’s hamburger, as he waited on a flowery couch for a teenager to walk through a cheap wooden door. He remembered that, but it didn’t make any sense. The memory should have been a happy one, yet all he could feel as he thought of it was the memory of something like a dead weight in his chest and a heart that hadn’t managed a rhythmic beat in several hours. Why did the memory of meeting Peter make him almost nauseous?

And why couldn’t he remember more?

“Tony,” Rhodey said, breaking into their conversation. “You can’t remember it clearly, can you?” And there it was. The horror laid bare. “It’s not your fault,” Rhodey said, quick to assure him even though he knew the memory of meeting Peter should have been easy to recall. The kid was a genius, a brave, strong man with brilliant morals and a sharp mind. Tony loved Peter. Why couldn’t he remember the exact look on the teen’s face when he’d first seen Tony in his living room? “But there are other things you can’t quite recall, aren’t there? Things that don’t quite fit.” A short moment, then, “Where’s Loki?”

Just the name brought a sharp twinge of panic to his chest, and that wasn’t right. He’d faced Loki, and he’d never felt that before. He frowned. “Thor took him to… I dunno. Somewhere. Then he went on the lam.” Was that right? Why did it feel like the darkness belonged to Loki somehow? “Is he why I’m like this? Is he the one who manipulated Wanda?”

“No,” Rhodey said, his voice snapping out. “Wanda wasn’t made to do anything.”

Tony shook his head. “She was. She says it herself. ‘He made me do it.’”

“That’s an excuse,” Rhodey said, then was quiet. Tony didn’t know what he meant. How did Rhodey even know who he was talking about? How long had he been in here for Rhodey to learn about Wanda, about what she’d likely done to Tony, and then come to some conclusion about excuses and blame? What did Rhodey know that he didn’t?

“Where did you meet Vision?” Peter asked. The question threw him. Vision? He opened his mouth, ready once more to answer the question, and then paused once more. He knew Vision. They’d fought together. But where had he come from? How did Tony know him? His heart raced as he thought. He didn’t know. He couldn’t point to an instant in which he’d first met Vision. To him, Vision had always been there. As if he’d been a figure in Tony’s mind. He tried envisioning the man, picturing when he’d first seen him. But maybe that wasn’t right? Maybe Vision had helped over comms or from far away. That would explain why he couldn’t remember. Maybe his voice?

Tony gasped. Why was he crying?

“Oh, crap, Mr. S, I’m sorry!”

Why the hell was he in tears thinking about Vision? Was he dead? Had something happened? No. He would have no way of knowing, and Rhodey and Peter didn’t talk as if Vision was dead. They were asking him to think about when he’d met the android, the same as they’d just finished questioning him on his first meeting with Peter. His reaction made no sense. Unless something awful had happened when he’d first met Vision. But if something awful had happened, why couldn’t he remember it? What was it he’d forgotten? “What’s happening to me?”

“Tony.” Steve. Tony latched on to his voice. “You haven’t lost these things. You’ve chosen to forget.” He shook his head. What would be the point in doing that? “Colonel Rhodes is right. It’s not your fault. You were given the chance to let it all go, and you did. The blame is on us. On Wanda. But we need you to come back to us now. Wake up. It will be hard. You won’t want to leave. But we need you.” A short hesitation. “I need you. Please.”

Tony shook. What the hell? He’d left Steve? Chosen to sleep? Why? “How?” he asked.

“Search for the cracks in your world,” Rhodey said. “Search for us between them. We’ll keep trying to reach you.”

Tony sucked in breath after breath, yet he couldn’t get enough air. “Why wouldn’t I want to come back?”

The silence then lasted a very, very long time. He shivered. “Mr. Stark,” Peter said. Peter’s voice was quiet, something Tony couldn’t recognize within it. He didn’t want to hear the heaviness in that tone, the weight that said Peter, of all people, carried something he shouldn’t have to. He heard scars in those words. He wished he didn’t. “Things aren’t pretty here. Not like in that world of yours, I think. But we love you. We want you to come home. It’ll be hard, but we’ll be here.”

He was still crying. Why the hell was he still crying? “All right.” The world was still dark around him, still empty and silent and vast. But he told himself to stand, and he did. “I’ll find my way out.”

“We’ll help,” Peter said, and Tony moved. He had to wake up, whatever that meant. Peter and Rhodey and Pepper and Steve were all waiting for him. He wouldn’t let them down.

* * *

Steve sagged against the wall as Wanda finally lost control of her depleted powers and dropped her hands. Tony had finally gotten one of the messages they’d struggled to send. Rhodes had just brought Spiderman – Peter, apparently, with an Aunt May, two pieces of information Steve was certain had not been for his ears – into the room when something had happened to Tony in that dreamspace.

Rhodey leaned his head down, his shoulders stiff as he took in what had happened. Spiderman looked lost, his gaze still fixed on where that display of Wanda’s had been, gone now that she’d finally exhausted herself. It was several hours past sunset, the city lights outside the room spray-painted like a Pollock painting outside the windows. Tony had yet to move, even though he’d been set up with an IV and a catheter by a doctor Pepper had called in. He hadn’t so much as twitched as the equipment had been put in.

Pepper would be upset to know she’d missed her opportunity to speak with Tony. She’d been busy dealing with the doctor, leading him to a guest room in the tower and asking him to stay overnight. Steve, however, had yet to leave Tony’s side. And that conversation had been his reward – or punishment.

Tony had asked for him. For _him_. But not him, because Tony didn’t remember the real world. He didn’t remember their arguments, their fights. He didn’t remember Steve standing over him with his shield, his entire thought on Bucky, Bucky, Bucky. He didn’t remember being left behind because Steve had to take care of Bucky first and worry about Tony second. He didn’t remember their battle against Thanos. He didn’t remember Steve’s secret about his parents’ deaths. Very likely, in that dream world of his, none of that had ever happened. In that world, he and Steve had been friends, lovers, with little to no conflict between them for an unspecified length of time. Hell, when he’d been uncomfortable and unsure, seeing whatever unnatural thing his mind had conjured up to warn him this time, he’d asked Rhodes and Spiderman if Steve was all right. He’d worried about Steve first and foremost.

That was Tony’s perfect world. A world in which Steve loved and cared about him, and Tony was allowed to love and care about Steve, in return. That was what Tony had always wanted, every moment they’d been fighting.

Even after hours to digest this truth, it still made him want to vomit.

That desire was what Steve had squandered when he’d walked away. He still didn’t think he’d done wrong when he’d chosen to protect Bucky. But surely there had to have been another path? If he’d just explained what he’d known from the start – if he’d stayed and spoken with Tony longer, when he’d reached out to speak with him – if he’d tried just a little harder, would Tony have been in that building, watching his parents be slaughtered? Would he have been left alone, suit mangled, Steve’s shield bright and shining beside him? Would he have been left alone with the fallout, with Ross, with the world? Would Steve have been able to find another path? He’d been so certain his hands, the hands of the Avengers, were the right ones, the ones that would best protect the world. But those same hands had hurt Tony. He’d been right to drop the shield, to recognize that his weren’t the hands that could protect so much. But had he been right to leave Tony behind, as well?

It was too much to think about. Too much to question. What had Tony been feeling when he’d proclaimed himself Steve’s friend, too? When Steve had said, “he’s my friend,” and Tony had said, “so was I,” what had Tony been thinking? Had he been wishing for this other world, where Steve accepted both of them without question? When he stood by Tony’s side, Bucky nowhere in sight? Where _was_ Bucky in that world? Or had Tony erased him? Was that a sign of cruelty, of not caring – or a sign that Tony couldn’t see Bucky in his perfect world?

Steve lowered his head. Tony had erased Bucky from that perfect world, but that didn’t mean he hated him. Tony had offered to get Bucky help, after all, before everything had gone to hell between them. It just meant Tony couldn’t see Bucky and still be happy. And right now, the very fact that Steve thought more of Bucky and where he was in that world than Tony and how he was faring meant something awful about him, as well. He cared about Tony. Why was he thinking about Bucky again?

Tony had called out to him. He’d wanted to cut his heart out right then and there, hearing Tony apologize for worrying him. Tony still thought there was something between them – between the real Steve and the real Tony. He didn’t know that they were still on the outs, or that Tony had never, not once, used the phone Steve had sent to him. He didn’t know that they could hardly stand to give two words to each other, or how they deliberately stayed in separate areas of the building simply so that they didn’t see one anothers’ faces any more than absolutely necessary.

Steve had warned Tony that he wouldn’t want to return. He didn’t think he’d properly warned Tony of the reality. He should have told Tony that they weren’t together. Should have prepared him for that. Instead, he’d told Tony he needed him.

It wasn’t a lie. It just didn’t have any right to be the truth.

He stared at Tony for a few more moments, then stumbled once more from the room. His stomach grumbled petulantly, no longer roaring, too used to being ignored these past several hours. He scrubbed his face, quickly deciding to head to the bathroom. He found one, just down the corridor, and opened the door. The room was huge, even as a guest bathroom, walls and tiles different shades of blue. He went to the sink and turned it on, splashing water on his face several times before daring to look himself in the mirror.

His super soldier body was holding up well to the strain. It was to be expected, though he would have preferred the toll of this day stamped indelibly on his face. He could see the slightest hint of bags under his eyes. It would have to do.

The truth was, even if Tony realized that he was in a dream and what it entailed, there was no guarantee he would want to come back out. Yes, he had Rhodey and Spiderman and Pepper here, but he had them there, as well. He had everything he’d ever wanted. There wasn’t much anyone could hand him to make him want to return. He was going to try, for now, because he thought Steve needed him. He was under no other illusions. Tony had called for _him_. Tony had listened to _him_. While Rhodes and Spiderman had called him back, had made him realize what was happening, it was Steve who had served as his impetus.

Steve hung his head, letting the water droplets fall from his hair into the sink as it ran. Tony would have acted, anyway, of course. He would have seen a mystery and been pulled into figuring it out. Tony always pulled on strings to see what happened. It was just part of his nature. Secrets, once sniffed out, were uncovered, simply because the man had an all-encompassing need to _know_. Steve ran a hand through his hair, pulling the strands into a haphazard mess, and breathed deeply through his nose. Tony had already been working to tell himself that something was wrong. He would have continued working on that. Eventually, he would have likely figured it out. But of course they couldn’t wait that long. He was in a coma, unresponsive to the world around him and unable to wake or move of his own accord. Without knowing how to wake him, he was trapped – unless, by some miracle, he could find a way out by himself. If Wanda was even correct in assuming such was possible.

If it wasn’t, they would have to rely on the man who had attacked them earlier that day. Which meant finding him, capturing him, and somehow getting him to cooperate. Villains were not known for their cooperation.

He looked around. The room was vast, partitioned into two for the toilet and sinks, the countertop reaching a length longer than some beds, and, behind the partition, what looked to be an enormous tub and a tall shower stall. The room was big enough to accommodate himself and Thor both without incident. The colors were soothing enough to calm even the Hulk, and a cabinet above the counter was large enough to hold even all of Tony’s hair products, along with anything Natasha might need for her stakeouts or undercover work. He stepped further inside, wishing he could know whether Tony had actually meant to make this place what it was in Tony’s dreamscape. But why would he be living in such a place in his mind if he hadn’t imagined it to begin with? Just who had this bathroom been made for?

“Tony.” He’d promised himself, when he’d gotten his shield back – buffed, and repaired, and good as new – that he wouldn’t let himself think about Tony anymore. He’d ordered himself to leave Tony and thoughts of friends and family in the past. He had a mission – to protect the world – and that had to come before anything else. He’d thought he was finally making the right decision – the decision that Captain America had to make. For what he had to _be_.

He leaned his head down. How many times was he going to get this wrong?

Someone knocked on the door. He was ready for it to be Nat, ready to tell her to please leave him alone, or perhaps Pepper Potts or Colonel Rhodes, demanding an explanation as to why he’d broken their rules and spoken to Tony. He hadn’t expected Wanda’s tired voice to slip through the door, to gently call his name. And despite how angry and upset he was over what she’d done, he couldn’t push her aside. “Come in.”

She did, her gaze flickering toward the water, which still ran full-force from the sink. He reached over and turned it off before backing up, giving her some space. She closed the door behind her.

He looked at her. She seemed hardly able to sustain the weight of her own body; her shoulders slumped low, her hair fell in limp tangles around her face, and her feet shuffled even in the space of the bathroom. She looked about ready to pass out. “You need to get some rest,” Steve said. She just blinked owlishly at him. “You’re no good to anyone like this, and we still have that man on the run to worry about.”

She shook her head. “I need to make it right,” she said, but her voice was dull and lifeless. There was little left in her. She’d been using her ability non-stop for hours, not giving herself any time to rest. While Steve could agree that she needed to do everything in her power to bring Tony back, pushing herself into the ground wouldn’t save Tony.

“And doing this. Continuing even though you don’t have the strength to. Is that helping Tony, or just helping to ease your guilt?”

She looked wide-eyed at him. She didn’t say a word.

“Let’s face it, Wanda,” he said, and he couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. He turned to the partition in the wall, the sight of the shower stall and the tub. “You and I, we’re both at fault here. You for what you’ve done, and me for allowing it to happen.” She made a short sound, one of denial, but he wouldn’t hear it. “I’ve known from the start how you felt about Stark. I didn’t say anything because I thought you might have a point. You’d lived in this time period. You’d known of him longer than me. You would know his vices, his personality, more than me. And everyone hated Stark. That’s why I was so ready to see the worst in him when he didn’t agree with me. I allowed myself to listen to the bullies.” He didn’t hear anything from her. There was little to say. “You listened to them, too. You chose what to think of him before you ever even met him. And so did I.”

When he did finally turn, it was to see her shrinking in on herself in shame. That was fine. He’d done the same a few times these past hours. “Now we’re facing the consequences of our self-righteousness. You’ve harmed Tony despite everything he’d been willing to do for us, and I let your hate fester, gave it fuel myself, and acted as if Tony’s feelings didn’t matter. I paid so much attention to you, and to myself. And you’ve done the same.”

Wanda’s lips trembled. “There’s reason not to trust him.”

“There’s reason not to trust _me_ ,” Steve said. “There’s reason not to trust anyone. Tony locked you in the compound. But we saw what happened after we fought. Tony had been right to believe the world wasn’t ready for us. For you. I believe he did it wrong, but then – what we did, how we fought him at the airport – can we truly say we were right? With the cost being Colonel Rhodes’ health?” Wanda looked away. “We’ve all been wrong, Wanda. Tony’s just the only one none of us are willing to forgive.”

She looked away, toward the sink. She stared into the porcelain as if it might hold some answers. But he’d already tried that. There were none.

“Rest,” he said again. He put a hand on her shoulder. She barely managed to take even that slight weight. “As soon as you’re able, you’ll need to come back. We’ve almost got him back.”

She nodded and opened the door, slipping out from underneath his hand. He let her go, stared around the room one more time, and left. There was nothing more they could do for Tony at the moment. He moved to the conference room Tony had been found in. He thought to search around, to try to find some news that might detail where the man they’d fought had run to. When he entered, he found Clint inside, staring at news reports and random sightings around the city. Clint turned his head slightly as Steve entered, but turned back to the scenes without a word. Silently, Steve came up to Clint’s side and looked up, as well. Both searched for something they could do.


	7. The Best Way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony wakes up.

Tony had never noticed it before, how he could walk through the front door of Avengers Tower and be greeted with a lobby more akin to a home. He never noticed how they all seemed to live on one floor, how the kitchen and living room may or may not be on the same floor. The gym was huge, but how could it take up as much space as all that on a different floor? And where were the conference rooms, and the labs? He remembered them being on the same floor as at least some of the rooms, but wasn’t that stretching the boundaries of space? And the basement – why would they have all their extra things in the basement, below the business floors? Why would they even have extra stuff when there were over a dozen floors just for them?

They might all be living in his tower, but it felt more like they were living in a mansion, or perhaps a compound?

Steve led him up from his labs, giving him every chance to pay attention to where his footsteps landed. But he couldn’t. Steve had hold of his hand, and he could feel the slight trembles from the near hour he’d laid comatose upon the lab floor, unresponsive to anything Steve had said or done.

Unresponsive. Because he was busy having a conversation with the real Steve.

He passed Wanda in the hall. His gaze caught on her. She watched him, her eyes wide, her lips pressed together. Silent. He could speak to her, but he already knew what she would say. Besides, she was saying everything that mattered right now. Each step he took shattered glass, brought forth the howling of something not unlike demons. He heard whispered voices everywhere, each crawling from the ground to reach his ears, each incessant enough to be heard even above the crunch and crash of glass. He felt something grab his arms, but nothing touched him. Nothing was there. Everything warned him not to move forward, not to trust this place. He knew why now. What he didn’t know was  _why_.

Why was he trapped in this dream? Why wouldn’t he just wake up? But there was a sign for that, too, and he didn’t want to see it.

Because every time he looked at Steve, he saw a mask. And when it fell off – and it did, over and over and over again, matching the destruction of mirror after mirror left in their wake – it fell to reveal a dark red face, nearly skeletal, with dark, orange eyes like lasers glaring at him.

It wasn’t Red Skull’s face, but it was similar. He knew that wasn’t what his mind was showing him, though. If he’d been meant to see Red Skull, then that’s what he would have seen. His mind was warning him of something else. Masks. He wondered what masks the others were wearing. What they looked like if he passed them now.

“Steve,” he said, the first words since the lab – since he’d insisted that he was all right. Steve turned immediately to him. He got a brief glimpse of Steve’s beautiful, worried face before that mask fell off again. He hitched in a breath.

“Tony? What is it?” Those lips moved, but they were little more than muscles on the mandible and maxilla, and he could see the outline of every single tooth through the flesh. He closed his eyes.

“Have you ever had a dream you didn’t want to wake up from?”

Steve frowned. “What?”

“Have you ever had a dream you didn’t want to wake up from?” he asked again, and took a deep, shuddering breath. “What was it about?”

Steve just looked confused. “Did you not want to wake up?” he asked.

He wasn’t getting it. Or, perhaps, he wanted to understand as much as Tony wanted to understand.

The Steve he’d heard while those chemicals had affected him – and he didn’t even know if they’d been real, if he’d been dosed with something or if he’d imagined the whole thing there, too – had warned Tony that he wouldn’t want to come back. That it would be hard, but that he had to do it. He looked around. Everything in his life was falling apart. He’d thought it because of the woman, this Wanda. A woman Rhodey already seemed to know somehow. He scrubbed his face. A world whose layout made little sense. One whose past events he couldn’t quite recall.

A dream. People always wanted to wake from nightmares. It was only the good dreams that pulled a person to linger in their beds.

How much better was this dream world from his own that he refused, actually  _refused_ , to wake up?

“I love you,” he said. For a moment, that horrible face disappeared, and the mask returned. Those brows scrunched, those lips twisted into a messed-up, confused grin.

“I love you, too? Tony, what’s going on? What happened down there?”

Tony looked back. Wanda still stared at them, sitting against the wall, arms around her knees. She tilted her head to the side. His heart pounded. The mirrors and their shards of glass had disappeared. The whispers had stopped. She wasn’t showing him anything anymore. Why? Had he failed somehow? Or… he looked back at Steve. Was he tied to this Steve, in a way that unbalanced his desire to wake up to the real one? Why wouldn’t he want to return?

His breath hitched. He blinked away a sudden onslaught of tears.

“Tony?” Steve turned fully to face him, one big hand raising to touch Tony’s cheek. He wiped away the tear forming with one swipe of his thumb. “Baby, what’s happened?”

There was a simple, obvious explanation for why he might stare at this man and see nothing but a monster underneath. A reason why he looks at Steve and sees nothing but reasons to stay. That other Steve, the one he heard but did not recall, was not this Steve.

He reached up and cupped Steve’s cheek. He searched the man’s gaze, the man’s face. He didn’t want to leave this. He didn’t want to leave  _him_. He’d fought against the pull of the real world, the pull of what he’d been seeing, simply because he desperately wanted to see this man’s face. Which meant what? Was Steve irreparably damaged, potentially by something he’d done? Was he angry, spiteful of something Tony had chosen? Had one of their fights ended in bitterness and hate instead of reconciliation? Did… Steve not love him?

He leaned up and kissed Steve. Those cool lips paused for a moment, likely unsure. Worried. But this Steve leaned into him, over him, wrapped one arm tight around him and pulled him close. This Steve kissed back.

The other Steve – the real Steve – for whatever reason, would not. This was something Tony himself had called a dream come true. Too good to be real. Steve had always assured him that it  _was_  real, that it  _was_  true. Tony should have known better.

Steve pulled away, finally, and ran his hand through Tony’s bangs, down his cheek. “Baby, you’re crying.”

He smiled. It felt so brittle he could hardly stand it. “I’m fine, love. Just tired.”

“Well, it is past time to sleep,” Steve said, though it was clear they both knew Tony was hiding. Because they were both Tony. This Steve was in his head.

The real Steve had been right. He didn’t want to wake up.

* * *

Wanda slept. Steve did, too, if only for a few hours. He and Clint traded off, him taking first watch as he went through mountains of sightings and police reports, then Clint as Steve got a couple restless hours of sleep. By the time he awoke, the sun was high in the sky and beaming through the windows. He spoke to Clint for a few minutes, then headed out. He went straight to Tony’s room. Miss Potts paced back and forth in the hall before his apartments. She turned to him as he came down the hall, her hand dropping from her mouth. She’d been biting her perfectly manicured nails. “Miss Maximoff just returned a few minutes ago,” she said, actually stepping aside to let him enter. “She’s preparing that… visual thing of hers again.” Miss Potts waved her arm as she said it, a gesture clearly attempting to indicate Wanda’s ability to call up the image of Tony’s dream.

“How is he doing?” he asked, his gaze traveling to the door. Miss Potts actually led him inside. Unsurprisingly, Rhodes and Spiderman still sat within, though they both appeared to be flagging. Steve saw the back of the kid’s head, a riot of brown curls, before Rhodes nudged the kid and gestured to the mask. Steve waited until the kid was covered again before heading in.

Tony didn’t look any better. In fact, he looked worse. The IV was now the only way Tony was receiving nutrition, and though he did not wake, he had bags under his eyes – evidence of non-stop REM sleep, with nothing deeper to show for it. Worse, Tony was battling the dream, if their conversation with him had been any indication. Wanda had only given herself a few short hours before returning to Tony’s side. Her power may have been stronger from the rest, or perhaps Tony had successfully pushed through on his end. In either case, they managed to actually speak. It had been startling, and torturous, to speak with Tony and hear him only reply through Wanda’s vision. To watch him come to grips with what they were saying – and what they weren’t.

Steve had been ordered to remain silent when Rhodes and Spiderman had initially told Wanda to let them try again. But Tony had been worried about him. Worried about the relationship he thought he had with Steve. And god help him, but he had played along with him. Simply to try to get him back.

He looked around. Wanda stood above Tony once more, nearly in the same position as last night, her hands waving furiously to bring Tony into focus. Rhodes and Spiderman sat wearily beside him, refusing to end their vigil, while Pepper Potts paced outside, likely attempting to think of every conceivable downfall so that she could prepare for it. Meanwhile, Steve’s party had left to parts unknown. Only these four – three, really, if you negate Wanda, who was here to rectify her mistakes more than she was to stand by Tony’s side – were supporting Tony. What he didn’t understand was  _why_.

How had things gotten so bad? How had they gone so wrong?

He cared about Tony. His care had never diminished, even as it had taken a backseat to Bucky, to freedom, to standing for his own convictions. For Tony’s sake, on Tony’s word, he had nearly bent those convictions. Only Tony could make him do that. He’d chosen to believe it a sign of emotional weakness. Something Captain America couldn’t afford. He’d chosen to not be Captain America, to simply be Steve, Bucky’s friend. And when he’d needed to be more – when the world had needed him to be more – he had chosen to be only Captain America, and to let Steve go. That was why he’d said good-bye to Bucky and told him to get on with having a civilian life. It was why he’d kept his distance from Tony despite his desire for reconciliation.

This had been his choice, and it had been wrong. But surely he couldn’t e the only one who cared about Tony Stark? Surely the other Avengers cared for him, too? Vision, surely. Nat, most likely. Clint? Sam, who hardly knew Tony and left the relationship with him up to Steve? Scott, who had chosen to keep his head down and simply be on-call as an Avenger? Bruce, who had gone once more into hiding, this time on another planet entirely, simply to keep the world safe from him? Thor, who still had business in his world and had yet to return? Those people stayed by Tony’s side in his dream. In order to make him want to come out, shouldn’t there be at least as many people standing by his side in reality? Shouldn’t there be more people who cared?

His gaze slid from the people in the room to the windows, to the expansive cityscape panorama just outside the glass. His gaze inevitably slid to the vision above Tony’s head despite his greatest efforts. He’d expected to find a battle being waged, or perhaps Tony standing in a room with a blank look on his face, not unlike the look he’d possessed when speaking with Steve and Rhodes and Spiderman last night. But nothing. He didn’t see anything of the sort. Instead he found Tony seated amongst his friends, looking around at the table as he blinked doe-eyed. Evening seemed to have fallen for him, time moving much faster for him than for them, despite how they all felt. Steve sat next to him, shoulder to shoulder, so close they bumped against each other with every breath. Clint regaled them all with some tale of his day, much to Nat’s sarcastic nitpicking and Thor’s hearty slamming of the table. Hulk humphed his way through the story, insisting there should have been more fighting. Sam constantly questioned the validity of the story, much to the twitching of Tony’s lips. Tony watched it all, the unknown woman watching him from her stance in the corner of the room. He didn’t smile, however. He just leaned against Steve’s arm, rested his head against Steve’s shoulder, and fingered the watch on his wrist.

Tony was hesitating.

“As you can see,” Miss Potts said, coming to stand beside him, “things have deteriorated.” Tony’s skin was pale, his body rolled slightly to the side to keep him from getting bed rashes or thrombophlebitis. The catheter remained. His lips, though it appeared someone was trying to keep them healthy with balm, were starting to crack. He’d been under for nearly a full day now, without true rest. No one could know how this state could be prolonged without severe repercussions. Steve knew the stories of men tortured with sleep deprivation, how their bodies would begin to break down. He didn’t want to think of that happening to Tony.

Steve couldn’t even fault Tony for it. The man didn’t want to wake up. Steve could understand why. He looked around this room and he knew that, if Tony were injured in that dream world, everyone would be by his side, waiting with bated breath for him to wake up. Not out of ego, but out of loneliness. Tony wanted their friendship.

He gritted his teeth. “Have we managed to make contact with him again?”

“No.” Rhodes piped up from beside Tony’s head. He looked up at Steve, but there was little anger left in him. There was only worry. None of them could do anything but watch. “He hasn’t messed with the watch again, and every time we try to get ahold of him… it comes up as phone calls, random visits. Tony ignores them all.”

“He’s found out what’s going on,” Spiderman said, his shoulders horribly slumped. “He just doesn’t want to deal with it.”

Rhodes clapped the kid on the back. “He’ll come back to us, kid. I promise you. Tony’s a lot of things – frustrating, incorrigible, and defensive, just to name a few – but one thing he isn’t is a quitter. He knows he’s not in the right place. He’ll come back.”

Steve didn’t know if that was true, but he wanted it to be. If Tony stopped fighting, then there was little they could do. At least for now.

Clint ran into the room, his feet clopping so loudly it should have woken Tony. Everyone else turned to the door. Tony still didn’t move. “I found him,” Clint said, his voice in gasps as if he’d run for miles. His eyes were wide. “I found him. The bastard who did this.” Clint nodded to Wanda. “I found him.”

Steve’s lips thinned. “Suit up.”

He moved to assemble, only to find himself trapped by Miss Potts’ hand in front of his chest. She glared up at him. “Not you,” she said. “Your friends have already gotten together to follow your trace of leads. Vision will go join them with Mr. Barton. You and Miss Maximoff are to remain here. It is your job to continue trying to bring Tony back.”

Steve looked back at Tony. He nodded. “All right. Clint, Nat’s lead on this. Relay that to the team, please.”

Vision and Nat both showed keen senses, an eye for a battle, and what was necessary for the team. But Nat was the one who had chosen both sides, who had stood for the team and not for her own desires. She would be trusted by everyone to do what was right while still caring about Tony and his interests. It was the best solution.

“She’s already taken the lead, Cap,” Clint said, and with a nod, he raced right back out of the room. The words made Steve falter. She had?

“You’ve been in here more than anyone, save her,” Rhodes said, nodding toward Wanda but still refusing to say her name. “Black Widow took lead on the outside.”

Steve had worked last night to help find Wanda’s tutor, yet Clint had never once told him where the others had gone. Why? But the answer was simple. Steve hadn’t even asked. He’d taken note of their absence, but it hadn’t dissuaded him from standing by Tony’s side. That had taken precedence over everything else. That had been his decision. An emotional decision. When Nat had gone to him, she had spoken of Steve’s feelings for Tony. Had she left to take the next logical step on her own? Had she expected him to need to stay by Tony and ensure his safety? Had she known, then, just how deeply his feelings ran? Deeper than he’d admitted. Deeper, perhaps, than he was admitting even now.

She had gone to fight so that he wouldn’t have to leave Tony’s side. And he’d let himself think that she didn’t care as much about Tony as he did.

Nat acted. She found a solution and she chased it. Sam would chase it, too, because the man had issues watching a comrade suffer quietly while he was helpless to do anything. Vision would act because it was a concrete solution and not one that relied on hope and luck.

They didn’t have Thor or Hulk. They didn’t have the same rapport that they did in Tony’s dream world. But they were still Avengers. They still believed in doing what was right. Even if that meant facing what they’d done wrong.

He looked back to Tony, to those pale, fluttering eyelashes and that still, still body. Tony’s dream was a fantasy. But it didn’t have to be.

They would do better this time. All of them. He swore it.

* * *

It had been a beautiful day. The weather had been cheerful, sunny. The city had been without incident, everyone choosing to not attack for once. Or, perhaps, that was because this was a dream, and he didn’t  _want_ anyone attacking, and so no one did. He’d enjoyed sitting with his friends and watching them mess around. He’d enjoyed Steve staying with him, not understanding his pain and fear, but remaining by his side, nonetheless.

Everyone had apparently forgotten about Wanda, though he saw her standing still in the corner of the room, her gaze never wandering from him. She’d disappeared from everyone’s lives. Everyone’s memories. There was no point in her integrating herself in this world when he knew now that it was a dream.

He curled his fingers around Steve’s until, for anyone else, they would have hurt. Steve looked at him, those brows lowering as he once again read Tony’s worry. He squeezed back, but didn’t ask. He’d asked several times today. Tony had promised him to explain it all come nightfall. When the day was done and they were alone in their room.

One day. He’d promised himself one last, shining day.

Clint finished his tale about his trip to the hospital, meeting a couple of men trying to steal drugs while he was there. Tony was appropriately impressed with Clint’s efforts, even as Nat critiqued his methods and Hulk demanded more smashing. The sofa scrunched slightly as he adjusted himself where he sat. He looked up at Steve, memorizing the line of his jaw, his cheek, the way his gaze slid immediately to Tony the instant he felt the weight of his stare. He smiled and leaned up for a kiss. Steve immediately obliged. Tony fought against the burning in his eyes. He’d known for hours now that this had to end. There was no reason to cry over a choice he himself would be making. Still. He couldn’t help but touch Steve’s jaw – slightly stubbled now, after so many hours through the day – and trace the path down to his chin. His heart ached. He wouldn’t feel this again. He wouldn’t hold on to any illusions otherwise. What he had here would be gone in a few hours. “I love you,” he said. It was likely the thirtieth time he’d said it that day.

Somehow, despite how annoying he was likely being, Steve just pulled him close, until no part of them wasn’t touching, and said, “I love you, too.”

The others watched with varying degrees of emotion on their faces – Clint looked ready to lob something at them, but Natasha and Sam looked amused. Hulk looked completely disinterest. Thor applauded them, as usual, still heartily excited to see his comrades together. Tony looked out at them all. What parts of them would be found in that other place, beyond the veil of perfection he’d blinded himself with? Would Thor still be happy about his interest in Steve? Would Natasha still think they were cute together? Would Clint still make barfing sounds, only to pick fights with anyone who so much looked askance at the two of them? Would Hulk still wave off their relationship as “obvious”? Would Sam still blush whenever he caught the two of them being remotely intimate with each other?

He memorized their faces. Hell, he didn’t even know if they were all still alive. Some of them might have died in that other world. Some of them might not be a part of the team anymore, just like Hulk had been taken from the team for a time. They might view him differently.  _He_  may be different. He thought he was a good man, despite his flaws. Perhaps, in reality, he was no such thing.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Steve said, his voice little more than a whisper in Tony’s ear. He looked at Steve again. The man’s long lashes spilled into his eyes as they cast themselves down toward him, barely masking the naked fear in the pull of those lips. Steve wanted to take him away, to find out what was wrong.

Tony looked at his friends, each trying desperately to pretend they didn’t see him and Steve practically plastered to each other. Clint was practically climbing on top of Hulk, stating that he deserved some game time since he’d been the only one of them to do something superheroic that day. Hulk tried ineffectually to pluck Clint off. Thor, of course, kept antagonizing them. Sam, ever the voice of reason, offered to have them trade turns. Clint and Hulk both gave him a look like he had just ordered them to rob a bank. Natasha seemed content to referee.

“Yeah,” he said, knowing he wasn’t hiding the sorrow in his voice. “Let’s go.”

“All right.” Steve led him up off the couch, even though Tony was perfectly capable of doing so himself. He said goodnight to the others, who each turned and gave him the kind of grin that said they thought they knew what he and Steve would be up to. Clint’s smile, of course, was formed around his finger, which he used to imitate barfing. Natasha threw one of the controllers at his head.

He laughed. It hurt his sides. He thought he might throw up.

Steve led him to their room, and this time he tried to focus on where his feet were taking him. He watched the living room and kitchen disappear behind him, saw the hall spread forward before him… and then they were at his room, Steve opening the door and leading him inside.

Fake. Fake. Fake. He clenched his eyes shut and breathed through his teeth. He couldn’t remember where he’d met Natasha, only that her hair had been long and her eyes piercing and unshakable. When he turned to Steve, busy closing the door behind them, he couldn’t see anything but how much he loved him. He whimpered, and Steve turned to him, grabbed him in a hug. “I’m here,” Steve said. “Tell me what’s wrong?”

He breathed in deep, let the scent of Steve’s clothes and skin pervade his senses. He didn’t want to forget this. He didn’t want to ever remember it. He gripped Steve tight, wrapped his arms around him. Touched his watch. “I love you,” he said again.

“I know, Tony,” Steve said, and pet his head. “I know. I love you, too. Please let me help you.”

He buried his face into Steve’s chest. “You can’t,” he said, and pressed down on the face.

He had to wake up. Which meant he had to leave this world behind. He had to remember that other world, the one Steve had warned him he wouldn’t want to return to. He had to leave. “Tony.” He just buried himself further. There was no point in the hot, leaden feeling crushing his chest. He was making his own decision. “Tony. Please.” Steve petted his hair, held him tight. Tony felt the press of the needle as it slid beneath his skin.

“I love you. I love the others. I love it here.” He gritted his teeth to stay in control. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The world went black. He opened his eyes. And he remembered.

“Tony.”

Steve’s voice. He closed his eyes. “I’m coming.”

He could feel the world around him, the press of something against his back. The weight of the air around him. His heart. His breath.

He opened his eyes.


	8. Immortals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony finds himself back in reality. Meanwhile, the scattered Avengers group together against a common foe.

Tony opened his eyes.

Steve’s breath gusted from him, leaving him empty. He couldn’t find the words in his throat to speak. Miss Potts leaned over Rhodes and Spiderman, who both leaned forward in their seats. Spiderman reached out for Tony’s hand. Tony blinked up at the ceiling, but at the touch, he turned his gaze to the side. And blinked some more.

Tony had been under the influence of that spell for over a day. Who knew what the long-term consequences would be? They’d all been so concerned with getting him to wake up that they hadn’t properly considered the fallout afterward.

“I’ll get the doctor,” Miss Potts said, and he realized that, perhaps, he had been the only one to not consider that problem. The CEO’s heels clicked as she hurried out, her clothing only slightly rumpled from the events of the past day.

Rhodes leaned over Tony, taking over most of his vision. “Hey. You’re in your room in the tower. It’s been twenty-six hours and forty-seven minutes since Wanda placed that spell on you, so just past five pm. Spiderman and I are here, along with Steve Rogers and Wanda. Pepper’s gone to get the doctor. Happy is with the other Avengers, helping them maneuver quietly through the city. They’re trying to catch the person who taught Wanda to do this. Do you feel any pain? Disorientation?”

Tony looked around. Wanda had yanked on Tony the instant he’d pressed that button, only for Tony to wake up, she said, “all on his own.” She sagged against the far wall now, her body pressed beside the wide windows. Her hair was damp with sweat. Steve started to back away toward the door when Tony’s gaze caught on him. He froze.

Steve had seen the kinds of gazes Tony could send his way. he’d seen everything Tony felt for him written on his face. And he’d seen Tony battling tears just moments before, as he prepared himself to return to them. The eyes Steve saw now were the ones Tony had only for this world – closed-off and hauntingly empty. Tony had returned, but this was not what he wanted.

Tony looked back to Rhodes. “No pain. Dizzy.” Rhodes nodded.

“All right. We’ll tell the doctor.”

Tony closed his eyes. Spiderman leaned closer. “Hey,” Spiderman said. He was trying to keep his voice down, but nothing was getting past Steve’s ears. “I’m really, really glad you’re back. I was scared I was gonna have to jump in after you or something.”

Tony reached up, IV still in his wrist, and patted the kid on the head. “Glad you didn’t,” he croaked.

Rhodes looked at the kid. “Water,” he murmured, and just like that, the kid was bounding up and racing out of the room, bumping into Steve in his haste.

“Whoops! Sorry ‘bout that!”

Steve turned back to see a grin on Tony’s face. It was small, and tired, and disappeared when he caught sight of Steve again, but it had been there. He hadn’t imagined it. It gave him hope. “We need to resolve this,” Steve said, his voice quiet. Still, it caught the attention of everyone in the room. “I don’t want to go too deeply into this when you’ve only just recovered, but there are a few things that must be made clear. First. What Wanda did to you yesterday is inexcusable. She’ll be taken off the team and kept away from you until she learns to control herself and her powers.” Wanda made an angry noise, but Steve glared her into submission. “Consider it the equivalent of being grounded. You nearly got an ally killed, simply because of your mistrust of him. Second,” he continued, and turned back to Tony, “we’re all going to have a talk after we catch the man responsible for teaching Wanda is apprehended. And by we, I mean those of us who have been distrustful of you. Third.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.” Tony blinked owlishly. “I hurt you. Several times, from the start of our relationship. To the point where you felt it better to meet a false me than deal with the real me anymore.”

Tony looked away.

Steve only waited a short second; it was clear Tony had nothing to say to that, and it was clearer he shouldn’t have to. Tony may have made mistakes, but the only person unwilling to bend had been Steve. That needed to change. “We saw a lot of that other world. The one you created.” Tony tensed. Rhodes snarled at him. “I don’t want to lie or hide anything from you anymore. So yes, we saw your dreams. Your perfect world. And yes, it was an invasion of privacy. It was also the only reason we were able to make contact with you while you were in the lab.” Tony didn’t meet his gaze. In Tony’s place, he wouldn’t have been able to, either – save to glare murder at those who’d done so, even if it had been to save his life. “Which brings me to the final thing I must admit.”

Steve struggled. He’d been brought up to believe that strength meant never mentioning the amount of _want_ in you, that being grateful for what you had was an essential of morality. He’d also been taught that love needed no words. His time in this century, however, had taught him differently. Wanting something more, something better, was what had brought about the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights Movement. It had brought about an acceptance of homosexual rights, had offered options to transgenders, atheists, Muslims, the poor. The world was still imperfect, but if people hadn’t let themselves _want_ , then none of that would be real today. And the only way any of it happened – the only way any of it could continue to happen was if people spoke up. As for him – if he wanted the people around him to know how he felt, he would have to speak up, too. Some things – important things – could not be taken on faith.

“Your dream isn’t impossible.” Spiderman whipped his head around at the words. He knew they would ring hollow. That was the consequence of hurting those you loved – you left them doubting. Distrustful. But he’d been there before, too, and he knew how to get them to believe again – prove himself worthy. “It won’t be the same. But what you want is what we all want. A home. With people who love and care about us. We – I,” he said, correcting himself, “allowed out friendship to break apart, through mistrust and self-righteousness. I was quick to judge you, and the situation, despite knowing the bounds of your merits and your devotion to this world and its people. I was so busy with my own problems, my own beliefs, that I ignored yours. And the other Avengers saw me do this and did the same. Too busy following me to realize I’m not perfect. I make mistakes.”

Tony snorted. It was his first contribution to the conversation. “You’re not kidding.”

Wanda huffed. It was in Steve to do the same. But he knew what it was like to be pummeled with so many blows you felt the need to hit back somehow – even if you could only hit with words. With Tony still pale in his bed, still hooked up to machined that had needed to keep him alive in case he never woke, with his dreams and fears laid out before him by someone who had already crushed his heart once before… Steve sent a warning look to Wanda and accepted the blow. “You’re right. No matter our differences, I should have been willing to speak with you until we found an agreement. And every time I learned something of Bucky, I should have trusted you with the information. I focused too much on protecting him and not enough on protecting the rest of the ream. Protecting _you_.” He’d told himself he would keep his emotions in check, because the one thing he could not afford was affection for a man – a teammate – a friend. He spent so much time pushing Tony away, testing him, that he forgot who he was. A man who hated bullies. A man who had someone else’s hopes to live up to. Erskine had wanted only one thing from him: to be a good man.

A lesser man could point out Tony’s flaws, the ways in which Tony had failed. A lesser man – the lesser man he’d been for years with Tony, when he’d wanted to find fault in Tony to prove to himself that his feelings were foolish, his attentions wasted on someone unworthy – that kind of man might list Tony’s failures as if to justify his own, perhaps even make his faults acceptable. Even lauded. Steve acted against Tony cruelly, but Tony was a bad man, and he deserved it. A lesser man might say that. A lesser man would drop Captain American’s shield and walk away, because the shield had to stand for something better than that.

He had his shield back. He could not be that kind of man anymore.

“I know you’ve just woken from a huge ordeal, one that isn’t over yet,” Steve said, forcing himself to speak. “The bigger conversations can wait until later. For now, it’s most important for you to know those four things. And this last, though I know you will doubt it. You will have every right to.” Rhodes scooted back in his chair, his gaze flinty. Steve ignored him. “Since before I even met you, I admired you. Your name was everywhere. You’d become even bigger than your father. And you’d done something more with that suit of yours – something I thought so fantastic it belonged more on the drive-in screen than in real life. And after that – over time, though I know I’ve failed to show it, oftentimes deliberately – I have come to care for you.”

Rhodes hissed. Tony tensed as if struck.

“In your position,” Steve continued, standing like a soldier on trial, “I wouldn’t believe a word I’m saying. I’m not asking you to. But I won’t have you convalescing and thinking that everything you wanted is unattainable.” Like so many of his own dreams. To go back to the past. To grow old with Peggy and Bucky and the Howling Commandos. To erase the horror of Bucky’s past. To take Tony to the drive-through theater and sit beside him in a cheap car, stealing touches beneath the dashboard. “All of this,” he said, lowering his voice, “is something we can work through, now that you’re back safe. We’ll do it in your own time, whenever you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now,” Tony rasped, his eyes narrowed. Those pale hands fisted in the sheets overtop him. In those deep brown eyes was a dare. _Prove it,_ they said. Steve stepped toward the bed. “Wanda. Leave.”

She wanted very good at following this order – or any, come to think of it; this time, she seemed to have caught a case of jelly legs. She tripped over her own feet making her way past the bed, nearly smacked Tony’s foot catching herself, and whacked the clipboard the doctor had left off Tony’s bureau. She fumbled a catch only made possible with her powers, tossed it back up like it was poisonous, and stumbled around Steve, her eyes wide as saucers as she left. He imagined everyone would know about his little confession as soon as Wanda got to her cell phone. She would tell Clint. Clint would put out a five-point bulletin.

Natasha was going to be insufferably smug.

Spiderman hopped out of the way as Steve moved to go to Tony’s side, nearly splattering himself against the far wall in his effort to give them space. Rhodes, on the other hand, moved slowly, and only just enough to prevent impeding Steve’s efforts. If, however, he harmed Tony in any way, the man would be within range to punch Steve.

Tony watched Steve’s progress around the bed without flinching. Waiting for Steve to hesitate? To fail? To pull away? To, perhaps, try hurting him again – because, at the moment, Tony felt low enough that another blow wouldn’t be as cutting as it would it he gave himself time to heal. Steve understood that feeling very well.

He didn’t know how to prove it without taking things too far. Tony had just woken up from paradise. Reminders of it would do nothing but harm. Pulling away would do the same. Acting too forward, acting too tame – everything he could try would hurt.

In the end, leaned over the side of the bed, his hands gripping the edge like a lifeline. Tony glared tight-lipped at him, prepared for a kiss he was clearly ready to deny. Instead, Steve rested his forehead against Tony’s. “I care for you, Tony Stark,” he said, careful not to use the term he might have used before the ice. More careful still of saying something too deep, something neither of them were ready to hear. “Even though you’re a man, and the son of an old friend, and a comrade on the battlefield. Even though I told myself it was wrong. I still care. Despite my best efforts.”

Tony swallowed. “You can’t stand me.” His voice was flat. And yet Steve could hear it waver.

“If I could find enough reasons to hate you,” Steve said, “then I could deny how I felt. I could call it nothing more than some unnatural urge, and I could ignore it. So I tried to find fault in you – in the idea of an us. I could hurt you, and hurt myself, and prove that we could never be compatible.”

Tony blinked up at him. The man had the biggest eyes Steve had ever seen. When the man was like this, struggling to hide how he felt, even those thick lashes couldn’t manage to hide the emotions those eyes expressed. “But we are.”

Steve closed his eyes. He’d been so busy picking fights with Tony that he’d erased those moments that had shown how effortlessly they could work together. Worse, perhaps, had been the evidence of the synergy between them in Tony’s utopia. He remembered their first battles together, Tony racing down to have Steve’s back. Racing forward to stop Loki, to protect people, to help Steve before they’d more than read each other’s files. The battle on the helicarrier, immediately after that hellish first argument, where they’d somehow worked flawlessly together despite the fight and the seeming incompatibility. And then the battle against the Chitauri, in which they’d worked together as if they’d been practicing for years. Perhaps that easy camaraderie had been part of his initial reservations. He’d been far, far too happy to have Tony back. And far too afraid of those seemingly innocent words, that joke that had yanked Steve back. Because Tony had looked at him when he’d said he hoped no one had kissed him, and Steve… well. Steve had nearly.

“All right, that’s enough private time,” Pepper Potts said, and she pushed through the tense atmosphere in the room as if it didn’t exist, reluctant doctor in tow. The man was what Sam would have called “a walking stereotype” – a bit hunched, a bit wiry, with a white coat and a primly cut gray beard that swung down to his collarbone. If Tony hadn’t been in such a raw state, he would have no doubt made a quip about the man.

“I’m going to check in with the others,” Steve said, knowing Tony’s friends wanted their time alone with him. Miss Potts was already scooting around to take her place at the other side of Tony’s bad. Rhodes looked ready to speak, his gaze on the doctor, Steve already dismissed in the man’s mind. Spiderman… well, if the eyes of that mask could get any wider, Steve would be very, very surprised. He stepped out.

“I’ll kill him,” Rhodes said the instant Steve was through the door. The man made no effort to hide his voice from Steve’s sensitive hearing. “He had no right.”

“No, he didn’t,” Miss Potts said, her voice icy beneath Rhodes’ heated rage. “But at least we have some explanation for his behavior toward Tony.”

“I dunno,” Spiderman said, and Steve tried to hurry away. He wished his hearing wasn’t quite as good as it was. “He’s saying what I think he is, right? And I mean, he’s old, isn’t he? Like, _old_ old. Gays only got the right to marry a decade or so ago. Didn’t people used to get lynched for that or something?”

A short second, and Steve hoped he’d gotten away. He was at the end of the hall, blindly turning left to escape. “It’s not for us to decide,” Miss Potts said finally, shutting the conversation down there. “It’s Tony’s. I, for one, will stand by his decision on the matter.”

Steve nearly broke into an all-out run then, trying to escape before he overheard Tony’s opinion on the proceedings. They’d invaded Tony’s privacy enough for one lifetime.

A part of him had wanted to offer something similar in return. To let Wanda place him under, and have Tony see. The idea burned like dust against his skin, like something ashy in his mouth. But it would balance the scales. It would let Tony see what Steve truly felt, what he truly wanted. But he also feared he might not be clever enough, or strong enough, to pull himself back out. He didn’t know what had gotten Tony to push away that perfect world and return to their own. He was just grateful he was back.

He stopped walking minutes after he’d stopped hearing anything, footsteps or the beeps of the machines or the voices of those who had stayed by Tony’s side. He found himself in yet another expensive hall, the space wide enough for a hospital bed to be wheeled past, with frames depicting, of all thing, himself. Old stuff, paraphernalia of the war, recruitment posters, pictures of Steve standing amidst the chorus girls selling bonds, some caricature of Captain America punching Hitler in the face. He traveled wide-eyed down the long hall, passing door after door on either side, and saw the pictures slowly change. There were a few paintings of him, artists who had attempted to capture the spirit of Captain America. Many wee signed and dated, and Steve saw they’d been hung in order of year – 1949, 1956, 1961, 1966, 1979. Each picture was dotted with other framed objects, or tiny glass cases hung on the walls, In one was depicted an old Captain America comic book, in some frames a few of the bonds Steve had been helping to sell. He saw several trading cards posted like a collage of family photos opposite a case with Captain America posters for Vietnam and the Korean War.

Each door he passed was locked, sealed. When he finally thought to ask, Friday said only, “these rooms had been sealed for years, Captain.” It took Steve a very, very long time to understand why this long hallway looked so familiar.

He’d seen Tony walking down it. Over and over again. In his utopia.

He looked closer, and this time he could see tiny, infinitesimal bumps on the walls – evidence of plaster application. The bumps were tiny, expertly done, but they hinted at nails being placed in different places on the walls. Steve didn’t know if it meant Tony had redone these hall with the idea of setting up these rooms, or if he’d done so afterward, when no one had moved in. Either way, the idea of so much effort actually being done left a deep, throbbing ache in his chest. No wonder these rooms had been closed off. Tony likely couldn’t stand the sight of this hall.

Steve headed to the last door on the left. He traced his hand over the metal paneling. This had been his room. He and Tony had walked in here together just before Tony had woken up.

This place was real. It wasn’t just in Tony’s head. He had brought it to life. He leaned his head against the door and breathed.

“Captain Rogers,” Friday spoke up. Steve slowly lifted his head. “Miss Romanov is attempting to contact you. She says she and the others have found the man Miss Maximoff trained under. She is asking for your help with strategy.”

Steve lifted his head. Finally. Something he could do. “Tell her I’ll be in the conference room in five.” He turned back toward the head of the hall. Then he hesitated. “Uh. Could you tell me the way to the conference room?” he asked, his voice sheepish.

“Right this way, captain,” Friday said. Steve hurried. They didn’t yet know Tony was all right. He would have to tell them.

* * *

With Friday’s help, Steve had been able to pull up a few cameras of the battlefield. Happy Hogan had driven the team to a location just past their target, in the direction he was heading. They arrived about ten minutes after Rhodes’ voice entered the room through Friday’s speakers, saying he’d been given permission to capture the man by the UN and their handler, Ross – notified, most likely, by Friday, just as Steve had been. No doubt, he wanted to perform experiments on the man. Rhodes, however, in informing the UN, as well, had stopped that ambition in its tracks. The UN apparently had little tolerance for such things.

They cleared out a section of road with little more than a stopgap town and quickly directed people away. While they did, Steve attempted to give them the good news. It turned out that Wanda had tipped them off, after all, just as he’d suspected she would. If it weren’t for the battle starting mere moments after Steve spoke about Tony’s recovery, he was positive Clint would have bombarded him with questions. As it was, Steve had needed to field loaded statements as he helped coordinate the newly reformed Avengers from a distance. It didn’t escape Steve that Vision’s efforts, though he coordinated flawlessly with team, were short and abrupt, nor that they ended as soon as the team-up wasn’t necessary anymore. He also saw a greater tension between Nat and Clint than usual; usually the two worked nearly as a single unit. Now Natasha would run in, help Clint gain high ground or assist with an escape, and then run off again. And whenever she needed to go high, she called for Sam. Sam, for his part, worked with everyone, his strategies syncing up with Nat’s quickly. With Steve and Friday watching over the tiny town’s streets, it was simply a matter of keeping the area clear and getting everyone working together. The latter was the part that proved difficult.

“Why,” Clint asked once after dodging several flying lamp posts, “are we even still fighting this guy? Stark’s awake now!”

“You’re right,” Natasha huffed, charging in-between the enemy’s attacks to strike hard and fast at his knees. The tall man grunted and lost his balance. Nat kicked him in the face. He threw the road at her, forcing her to ride it like a wave before jumping to the sidewalk. This guy didn’t orchestrate an attack on one of us, or on New York, or anything. Why would we want to stop someone like that?”

“Hey!” Clint said, apparently offended. “I’m just saying – we’re missing, like, half our team here. Shouldn’t we retreat until we can regroup?”

“He could attack us again,” Sam said, cutting through the chatter as he flew through the air. He played the distraction game, setting himself up as an easy, obnoxious target, taking constant fire so the others could get close. The job was one Tony usually volunteered for. “He could put half the city into those comas before we come back full-force. Or worse, he could disappear and wait for another chance to strike.”

“Or perhaps,” Friday said, her voice carefully neutral through the linked comms, “we could simply recruit him.”

“All right, that’s enough,” Steve said, breaking into the conversation before it got any uglier. He hadn’t known just how strongly Tony’s AI’s might feel about their creator being attacked like this. Friday clearly held a grudge against them all. “That’s a topic for when everyone gets back. For now, just focus on taking that guy down.”

“Agreed,” Vision said, and pulled close to the enemy. Vision had been the one moving the cars still trying to drive the ruined highway, but it seemed he’d finished that job. He passed right through everything the man threw at him, until at last he stood before him. “Ah,” Vision said suddenly. “I know why he feared myself and Mr. Stark. Chances are he would fear Colonel Rhodes’ appearance on this battlefield, as well.”

Steve opened his mouth to ask why when it clicked. “The suits.” Then, a moment later, “he can’t affect minds through machinery.”

“Precisely, captain,” Vision said.

Taking out Tony would have been the perfect choice, in that case. With Tony down, Rhodes would be off the battle scene, too, glued to Tony’s side as surely as Rhodes’ injury had stopped Tony’s pursuit of Steve. It would also have the added bonus of breaking Vision’s calm, though Steve wasn’t certain how positive the enemy had been about that. Perhaps he’d simply banked on Wanda and Vision fighting, or thought it better to go up against one than three.

With that knowledge gleaned, Natasha altered their roles. She ordered Clint down low, gave Sam and Vision the high ground, and made Sam stop playing chicken with the man and instead swing as if to take him from behind. While the enemy’s attention was turned to Sam, Widow took his left, acting as the surprise attack. The enemy countered by upending an entire building onto her – going for the physical kill instead of trying to take the time to catch her in the dream spell. As they’d thought. He didn’t have the time for that spell with so many of them on him. But even as Natasha disappeared beneath the rubble, even as Steve’s throat choked in fear, Vision continued toward the enemy’s right. He swooped low, intangible, and reached into the man’s chest with both hands. The enemy froze.

“I’m all right,” Natasha called within the sudden stillness. “I slipped in through the window.” No doubt she’s needed to break said window, which meant multiple lacerations, along with all the other injuries one could receive from _a building falling on top of them_. Still, she was conscious and talking. That had to be good.

Vision, either unconcerned or too focused on the battle, ignored their conversation. The android shimmered in the footage picked up from Stark’s satellite, indistinct enough that he had to be phasing his entire body. Over the comms, Steve heard Vision speak to the man. “You need not fear. My hold on your lungs will end after you pass out. Any attempt to stop me, however, may have a very grievous effect.”

It was risky, nearly brutal, for all its efficiency. If the man fought back, his death could well be on Vision’s hands – literally. And even if the man cooperated, who could say what the long-term repercussions of such an attack could be? Then again, if this didn’t work, would any of them be safe from the man? Could any of them avoid the spell he’d taught Wanda, if he chose to use it on them? And why wouldn’t he? It had worked so well on Tony.

He felt like he wasn’t the only one to hold his breath as they all waited for the man to fall to the lack of oxygen. They all heard when the man spoke, his voice thick with an Eastern European accent. “I take it your dear friend has not awoken, then. Have you seen what he most wants? Is it not as pitiful as I imagine?”

The last words were little more than a breath. The man tried to grab Vision’s hands, to wrench a car into Vision’s face, only for the metal and his fingers both to slip through Vision’s incorporeal form. The man tried to send another car, this time aiming for the both of them. Vision must have done something, however, because the man seized in the android’s hold. The car dropped like a rock back to the ground. The man’s arms fell limp to his sides. His eyes started fluttering shut, but not before Vision finally answered the man’s taunt. “We are here because we avenge. That is what we are. And one more thing.” The android’s eyes narrowed. “You underestimate Iron Man.”

The man finally fell unconscious. Vision released him, let the man fold limply around his arm, and sank slowly down to the ground. Steve sent a confirmation of the successful retrieval of their target to the UN while the team trekked back to Happy’s car. It was time to return home.


	9. Immortals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avengers talk, consequences are meted out, and time moves inexorably forward.

They all met in the same conference room they’d last gathered in with Tony. It felt empty, even with Colonel Rhodes and Spiderman taking a place before them all as if giving them a debrief. Perhaps they were – one they’d needed for a long time. Nat sat between Steve and Clint, though she scooted her chair a hair’s breath closer to Steve as she did. Steve expected Sam to sit on his other side, but the man instead took the chair beside Clint, with Wanda beside him, on the end. Vision sat against the side wall, the only one breaching the space between Rhodes and them.

Spiderman looked around the room, taking in the advanced machinery on the table, the holographic displays that Rhodes turned off so they would see each other unimpeded. The large, round white table cordoning off Steve’s side from Rhodes’. “This feels weird,” Spiderman said, breaking the silence like a baseball bat. He looked around at them all, then at Rhodes. “Right? My first official meeting, and it’s to chew everybody out.”

“If you’d like,” Rhodes said, “you can leave that to me.” The man looked them over like one might moldy clothing. Clint lifted his chin. Steve dropped his.

“Nah. Seeing all that’s enough to get me motivated,” Spiderman said. His voice said he was a child, yet there was so much maturity in that tone. Steve had questioned why Tony would bring a child anywhere near that battle at the airport. Now he thought he understood. Steve had fought to do what was right long before he joined the army. If he’d been given the super serum when he’d been a teen, he would have been doing far more than picking fights in alleyways. He would be fighting, same as this kid. Very likely, Tony saw in Spiderman what Bucky had seen in him. “Mr. Stark didn’t want to come back,” he said. “I never even knew he felt like that. I knew he’d had a hard time with all of you, but – he never said anything bad about any of you, you know? Even when you guys were fighting, all he said was that you thought you were right when you weren’t. He didn’t say you’d – that any of you would go so far as to do something like this.”

Clint waved one hand. “You can’t blame the girl for not trusting His Majesty back there. He hadn’t exactly given us good reason to.”

Natasha hissed. Vision turned away from the man.

Rhodes leaned on the table. “Did you just attempt to turn Tony, the unequivocal victim here, into the perpetrator? No?” he said, stopping Clint before he could refute him. “Then you’re just saying Tony deserved it.”

Clint made a sound not unlike angry negation. But when he opened his mouth to correct Rhodes, he frowned. There wasn’t a single thing he could say that wouldn’t confirm Rhodes’ words. He settled on a silent glare.

“I honestly don’t care what any of you thinks of Tony. You’ve all shown yourselves unworthy – save Vision and Spiderman – of his friendship. So, to me, none of you matter.” Rhodes took a deep breath. “But to Tony, all of you obviously do.” He looked upset by that fact. If it were Bucky, Steve wouldn’t be sad. He’d be furious. He’d insist they weren’t worth it. He would try to get Bucky to walk away from them. Perhaps that would be better for Tony, as well. But Steve was selfish. He was thankful Rhodes didn’t try to separate Tony from them. He didn’t like what that said about him.

“We’ve messed up,” Natasha said. Her body was tense where she sat, her hands primly placed atop her thighs. They curled into fists as she spoke. “But we can’t change that.”

“Seriously!” Clint interrupted. “You’re acting as if everything was our fault,” he said, glaring at her. “As if Tony hasn’t been to blame for nearly every mess he’s been in.”

“That sounds an awful lot like saying he deserved it,” Nat said.

“I’m not! But hey, if that’s how you act–”

“Clint,” Steve said, at the same instant Spiderman webbed Clint’s mouth shut.

“I can’t believe you’d say that,” the kid said, and it was the hurt more than anything else that had them all listening. Even Clint, thought he yanked at the web over his lips as he did. “You’re supposed to be heroes. You’re supposed to show compassion even to your enemies. But you can’t show any for your fellow Avenger? For Tony, who looked after you and fought with you and provided for you? Yeah, he made mistakes. So have I. My mistakes have gotten people – people I loved – killed. Does that mean you think I would deserve it, too, if people came after me? Would you just ignore it or shrug it off if I got hurt? Because Mr. Stark isn’t like that. He worries about me all the time. More than you ever do for him.”

“You’re a kid,” Clint said, finally managing to pull off a sliver of the web. His words still came out muffled.

“So?” Spiderman asked. He threw his shoulders back. “Does that mean that if I mess up after I’m eighteen, I’m not allowed to be a hero anymore? I have to be perfect the moment I turn into a legal adult?”

Clint scowled. He glared at the wall behind the boy’s head.

“No.” It was the first time Sam had spoken, but when he did, he did with conviction. “No, you don’t have to be perfect. At any age. And no, Hawkeye’s not right to say what he’s saying. We’ve all been too quick to judge Tony Stark. It’s put us in a position where we’re strangers to one another. Such strangers that, when Stark created that fake world of his, he made a false me. I guess because he thought of me as essential to the team – likely because of how close Cap and I are – but not knowing what to make of me. Smart? Awkward? Awed by his company? Straight-laced? Inventive? And yet I already pretended I knew everything there was to know about him. All based on the media and what I’d heard from others.”

Steve hadn’t really thought about what it meant to make Sam younger, brighter, more focused on Tony than on Steve. He might have thought it a show of ego. Sam, however, had seen something different. Something more in line with the dream world Tony had created. Tony had made Sam into a beloved member of the team, and a part of Tony’s life. Someone who cared about Tony as much as Sam cared about Steve. Not fair to who Sam was? Perhaps. But in that dream world, they’d all cared about Tony – they’d all looked out for him, in ways they never had in reality. One could call that unfair to who _they_ were, too.

“A lot of people mistake a celebrity’s public persona for their actual selves,” Rhodes said. “Tony’s has always been ugly. And the media knows it can’t lambast soldiers for civilian deaths in wars without a huge backlash from the people. Those who create the weapons for us, however, have always been open game. Easier pickings even than politicians, who can always say they’d never planned on civilian deaths. But who can plan for weapons not killing? So people blame him. People _still_ do it, even after Stane. Even after he stopped making weapons.” Rhodes glared at them all. “Even years as the Iron Man. He’s still the easiest target. And in the limelight as he and his company always are, he’s the most accessible.”

Steve shifted in his seat. Wanda stared at her toes.

Natasha was the one to speak again, after countless heartbeats of silence. “Beat it into us if you must,” she said. “I know I should have spoken to Tony about my suspicions over Cap’s intentions at the airport. If I had, perhaps things there might have been different. And I blamed Tony for having to go on the run despite knowing Ross had little patience with us. I’d seen how Tony had needed to defend us – you – from death squads. I shouldn’t have said what I did. But that can’t be changed.” She took a deep breath and leaned forward. “Tell us what we can do _now_.”

“There is no easy answer for that,” Steve said. He looked at her. “There is no set way to regain someone’s trust. Sometimes it’s impossible.” Please, please don’t let it be impossible for them.

She sent a flinty stare his way. “But there’s always a place to start.”

Vision shifted toward him, his body oddly tucked into a chair, something he never did. He clearly didn’t wish to loom over them all, refused to stand as Rhodes and Spiderman did. Did he not consider himself a worthy candidate for defending Tony? “Mr. Stark does not hold grudges against others.” Clint snorted. Vision ignored him as if he wasn’t there. “If you show you are worth forgiveness, he will grant it.”

Steve might have been reaching, but he thought Vision’s gaze might have lingered on him a short moment longer than the rest.

“Are we all being serious right now?” Clint asked, throwing his hands wide and looking at them all as if they were mad. Sam and Nat both pulled moved slightly further away from him. “So Stark’s big dream is for us all to be one big, happy family. Does that mean we’re supposed to ignore everything that’s happened before? Are you really gonna be all buddy-buddy with him just because it’s what he wants?”

“You’re here because you left him alone, injured – trapped – because you didn’t even know him well enough to know something was wrong, and you didn’t care enough to check properly, despite knowing he was being called to lead on a battlefield – a battlefield you wern’t legally allowed to be on without his supervision!” Rhodes snarled at Clint. “Whether you want to make it up to Tony, whether you give a shit or not about his dream, has nothing to do with it. All of you were on probation, something only granted to you, by the way, by Tony’s unceasing PR efforts. Which means you,” and here he glared at Wanda, “are done. Period. Even if Tony forgives you, I won’t, and my word holds as much clout as Tony’s. More, in this matter, as I’ve been put in charge until he’s checked over and released by his doctor.”

Clint raged at the news. Everyone else, including Wanda, was silent. “You’re gonna let her be locked up in that place again? They treated her like an animal!”

Rhodes slammed his hands on the table so hard Spiderman jumped. Monitors flashed on, one by one, before suddenly blinking out again. Friday, most likely. “And she attacked Tony Stark in his own home with zero provocation! After her shit with Lagos, something she _still_ has yet to be held accountable for, do you really think the public would accept anything less?!” He pointed at Wanda. She didn’t even look up from her study of the floor. “This was her premeditated choice! The effects weren’t what she expected? Perhaps she shouldn’t have done it to begin with! _Especially_ since she clearly has no better control over her powers than she did when the captain took her into the field all those years ago!”

Wanda pulled her feet up onto her chair and rested her chin on her knees.

Steve opened his mouth to defend her, to find something to keep her from being returned to that place – but he had nothing. He sat, stunned. Finally he said, “cruel and unusual punishment.” His heart hammered. It was all he was able to say. There was no excuse for what she’d done. Rhodes was right. She’d attacked a teammate. All Tony had done was allowed Wanda a private conference when she’d asked for one. Tony hadn’t deserved to be attacked. Even if it would have come and gone, a quick sleep before being woken again, it still wouldn’t have been acceptable. If people attacked one another whenever they found they didn’t trust them, then everyone would be in jail. He looked at Rhodes. “The Raft is cruel and unusual punishment. There must be another way.”

Another way to punish her. Because she did need to be punished. There had to be consequences for this. But to send her away? To treat her like… he covered his face. Like she was a monster who would attack anyone. She wasn’t a monster. She’d been used. But what did that say, when an Avenger would turn on their fellow with little more than a bit of persuasion? What did that say for the safety of the civilians in their charge?

“The Raft may be unreasonable,” Rhodes said, “but there’s little else to promise she won’t use her powers the moment she feels herself justified.”

“She won’t,” Clint said. “She’s not a loose cannon.”

Rhodes sent him a droll look.

“Dude, I don’t know about you,” Spiderman said, “but I don’t trust her within ten feel of _me_ , let alone my friends.” he turned to Rhodes. “Would she be able to mess with me, too?”

“She got the Hulk, kid. Remember Johannesburg?”

Spiderman actually recoiled. “What?”

Clint grunted as he yanked on the webbing, but it didn’t give. He pointed at his face. “Off. Now.”

“I prefer you more this way,” Nat said, her smirk darker at its edges than usual with him. Steve frowned.

“Clint, working with a team means dealing with people you sometimes may not like. You should have learned that as a member of SHIELD. So where is this coming from?”

Clint glared at the wall beside Vision, turning his face as far away from Steve as possible. Unbelievable.

“He’s upset because of the consequences of his actions back then,” Nat said. Her words only hinted at something. It must have been big enough that she didn’t think it appropriate to betray Clint’s confidence on the subject, even with how he was acting. Something awful, then. She tapped a foot. “There isn’t much we can do in our position now,” Nat said, her lips twisting as she considered the problem as if it were a mission. “Benching us is simple politics. It doesn’t resolve the problem of us having ignored Tony’s dilemma.”

“That’s a matter of understanding one another,” Sam said, frowning at the petulant Clint. “We learned more about Stark in the past twenty-four hours than we’ve had any right to learn. We can all guess his motives now, even looking back at events of the past.”

It was true. Steve had always thought the worst of Tony’s actions, even knowing he was Iron Man and an Avenger and part of the team. He’d been pushing Tony in ways he’d never pushed the others, simply because of his fears and his expectations. Looking back at how Tony had reacted now, he seemed more like a cornered animal than a cruel businessman. Steve rubbed his hands over his face. “It takes more than seeing… that… to understand someone. Or, really, it takes more than that to be trusted to understand. And I think we can all agree that sticking us in the tower without giving us anywhere to go will only make Tony feel more trapped. And we can likely agree that community service isn’t exactly going to clean our consciences.”

Clint snorted.

“Choose what you wish, Clinton,” Vision said, and here he finally stood. He looked more natural in that stance, his body easing into its stiff stance as if actually comfortable. “I must take responsibility for not returning here sooner, and must ask Mr. Stark what he wants done about my failure.” Yet Vision looked to Rhodes and waited for his nod before making his leave. He didn’t head for the door. “All of you will be held responsible by the UN and by Colonel Rhodes. What you choose to do during and after is on you.” He made to space through the wall.

“Vision! What did we tell you about the door?” Steve said, holding out a hand.

Vision turned to him, brows drawn low. “That is a rule for you and Wanda, as it makes you uncomfortable. Mr. Stark has praised the practicality of it here in the tower. He finds it ‘fascinating.’”

Steve didn’t know how to react to that. Vision left before he could figure it out.

“Getting benched is just common sense right now,” Rhodes said. He seemed to be trying to decide how to respond without getting into another fight. Both he and Spiderman looked like they wanted little to do with any of them. Vision may very well have left because he couldn’t stand to listen to this anymore. “Further punishment won’t be necessary unless the UN demands it. Hopefully. You can always feel free to leave the tower,” yet here he grimaced, “though you should be able to comprehend, after what you saw, how that might be interpreted.”

Abandonment. Not being able to accept Tony’s dream. Steve closed his eyes.

“We didn’t have any intention of leaving,” Nat said, holding up one hand. “But giving him space, letting him acclimate to… well, it will seem at first as if we simply feel guilty. Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe that’s where this has to start. But Tony has a problem with that.”

“Talking about it won’t change anything,” Spiderman said. “Just be honest with him. He’ll know if you’re faking it for his sake. All these worries you have about him not accepting what you’re doing – instead of talking about it here, shouldn’t you just speak with _him_ about it?”

Steve nodded. “He’s right. Tony’s not stupid enough to not know we’re acting on what we saw.” He looked to Wanda, still curled up, completely silent as they spoke around her. “And Wanda?”

“Benched is only the beginning,” Rhodes said, his voice hard. She didn’t even flinch. “She’ll be put up for review, likely stripped of her title as Avenger, and placed in some correctional facility. Tony’s been trying to find another solution than the Raft ever since he’d seen all of you in it, but there isn’t anything out yet. I don’t think Tony trusts anyone with anything he makes.”

“’Bout time,” Clint said, and Steve felt something in him close to anger. He tamped it down.

“Clint, if you want to blame someone for what happened to you, blame me. I’m the one who called you out of retirement, not Tony.”

“Or blame yourself,” Nat said, her voice falsely light, “since you’re the one who _chose_ to come out of retirement.”

Clint just kept yanking on the webbing. Spiderman did not go to help.

“Make your own decisions,” Rhodes said finally, leaning up. He pulled away from them physically, the way he’d been pulling from them emotionally since the moment he’d learned Tony wasn’t on the battlefield with them. “But no matter what Tony says, if I hear even the slightest shit has come from any of you – and Friday will be on watch – then you’re out. Period.” He glared at them all. “I will not compromise Tony’s safety for any of you. Remember that.”

* * *

Pepper Potts stayed with Tony the first few days, with the driver, Happy Hogan, keeping guard outside Stark’s room. Rhodes, Spiderman, and Vision were allowed through, and of course the doctor. Everyone else was turned away. Steve only tried once before accepting Tony’s decision.

Because it _was_ Tony’s decision. Rhodes hadn’t demanded they leave or stay away while in the conference room. He wouldn’t force them away now unless it was what Tony wanted.

Wanda had, indeed, been punished by the UN. Yet forced therapy in an interrogative environment – Wanda in a sealed room with a microphone, her therapist in another – was not even remotely what Steve had thought would happen after Rhodes’ outburst. He had a sneaking suspicion Tony was involved. By the look of Wanda’s defeated stance every time he saw her, he thought she might believe the same. Whether she did or not, however, was uncertain; she said very little to anyone anymore, and used her powers even less often. Clint – able to speak after an hour, as the webbing disintegrated as if into mist – stayed away from all of them, leaving the tower for days at a time before returning. Nat stayed out of the way, though she checked on Tony’s progress often. Sam worked with Rhodes and Vision in the gym. Steve could only practice with Vision, however; Rhodes still stiffened every time he saw Steve. But that was fine. If it had been Bucky, Rhodes would be black and blue.

Weeks passed, and then months. Clint’s sullen demeanor turned quiet and quieter as Sam, Nat, and then finally even Steve were allowed back out on the battlefield. Tony, as he recovered, kept away from them all, his conversations in battle shorter, more direct. Sam, of all people, had been the first to be given permission to speak with Tony alone, as none of them had been able to do since Wanda. Steve had even walked past once to hear them laughing.

Tony, those first few weeks, barely came up to the communal rooms. He stayed in his private suite, or in his lab, and barely poked his head out for little more than mandatory overview meetings in one of the rooms – in which Rhodes, Spiderman, and/or Vision always attended, as well. The three seemed to have taken up permanent residence some days, even though Spiderman had to keep running off for school or something.

Steve and Tony rarely spoke to one another, and never alone, for almost four months. Even though it wasn’t easy or simple, he felt like the process was more natural. At first, every interaction was so forced he felt like the words came through gritted teeth as he grimaced his way through them. Tony didn’t seem to fare much better. When they did speak, it was over inanities – breakfast, the latest battle, tactics. How quickly Nat had taken down Sam. How Stark Industries was going. How Pepper was doing. Tony’s recovery. Once, Steve had asked Tony why he let Vision walk through walls. Tony, completely confused, said, “why not?”

“What if you’re naked?” Steve asked.

“He’s not a creeper,” Tony said with a laugh. “He doesn’t just bust into my room – though, from the look on your face, that used to be a problem?” But that had just made Tony laugh again. It was amazing, Steve thought, how he hadn’t even realized how long it had been since he’d heard that sound. “That’s amazing. Well, I guess catching sight of my naked ass a few times would either cure him or entice him.”

And then, very suddenly, things had gotten awkward again, as Steve’s gaze dipped down to Tony’s hips of their own accord. He’d cleared his throat, made his excuses, and left, before Tony could run away from his own room in his own building.

When those four months of awkward conversations finally passed, they passed with the kind of sudden progress Tony Stark was known to make in his business ventures. To wit: Tony cornered him one day as he was leaving the latest mandatory meeting. He’d even blocked the doorway.

Tony was shorter than Steve. It was something he’d always known academically, but had never really processed until he’d stood next to Tony during one of those awkward conversations. One of the first ones, when Tony had only just gotten released from mandatory convalescence and had still been sulking over the fact that Miss Potts and Spiderman had not let him shoo the doctor away early. Steve had walked in to see Tony grabbing up whatever snacks his fingers first wrapped around from the fridge. The man stood straight quickly and looked ready to hurry back down the hallway, only to stop short at the sight of Steve. The fact that he’d been in the common room kitchen instead of his own meant he’d been put on some sort of diet – something very likely unnecessary, though Steve could understand the doctor’s caution – and had wanted to sneak in some ‘real food’ while his benefactors weren’t watching.

But that hadn’t been what had caught his attention. It had been how that small pile of food had managed to creep up the man’s chest to his collarbone. It had emphasized how much shorter than Steve Tony was. Even though the man stood toe-to-toe to him on everything, he was much smaller. Just like he’d looked in the bed, so he was in real life. It had left him staring stupidly for so long Tony had started clutching the food like a shield. Steve had demurred and backed out, holding up his hands and claiming momentary blindness.

Now, he was well aware of that vulnerability. Tony could very well take care of himself, but he was no super soldier. Steve cleared his throat. “What’s up, Tony?” Affected casualness hadn’t worked even before all of this. He wasn’t surprised to see it didn’t work now, either.

Tony leaned past him and pushed the door closed. They’d stood close to one another in the past months. Usually on the battlefield, while Tony was still in his armor, but they’d stood close in the kitchen, sat on opposite ends of the sofa, walked down a street together. There was something different, however, in doing so in a private room, alone.

Once the door clicked, Tony leaned back and put his fists on his hips. “Your turn,” he said, affecting the same light tone as Steve. His, however, sounded almost natural.

Clearing his throat again would just be too obvious. He did it, anyway. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Those chocolate flickered for just a moment before Tony started walking back to the table. Steve, uncertain, moved back to his chair. Since Tony didn’t sit, however, neither did he. “When I first woke up,” Tony said, and Steve gulped. He knew exactly where this was going. “You said you cared for me.”

Steve forced himself to stand straight. “Yes.”

Tony leaned on the back of his chair. He stared up at Steve through long lashes. “You had to know I wouldn’t believe you.”

“Of course.” Steve nodded. His mouth was dry as a desert. His hands actually shook. “I wouldn’t. Especially after – after knowing we saw.” Tony’s face scrunched for a second. “Sorry,” he said, though they’d all apologized for looking several times before.

Tony looked away. “You know you’re the reason I left that place,” he said. His voice dripped bitterness. “It worked, you talking to me. Getting through, using whatever means you had. It was the right choice. I wouldn’t want to be trapped in some dream. It’s… not the same.” The words didn’t convey the depth of the meaning, but Steve understood the message, nonetheless. _It wasn’t real_. “You got me out of there by looking through and telling me you needed me to wake up.”

Because, in that dream, Tony had loved Steve, and Steve had loved Tony, and it had been easy for him to put Steve first. Because, in there, Steve would have put him first, as well. Unlike, Steve thought, any time in the real world.

“I told you to prove it back then,” Tony said. He pushed off the chair. His arms swung limply by his sides as he stared at Steve. “But you played nice. For once. You’ve been playing nice since. All of you have, except Clint.” Steve grimaced at that one. “Yeah. Well, after the divorce, who can blame him?”

It had been months, but still Steve had never learned what the consequences of Clint’s actions back then had been. To hear his wife had divorced him shook him. “He should be angry with me," Steve said.

Tony snorted. “Last time I checked, every man was responsible for himself.” His words contradicted what he’d just said, but that was, he was learning, something else that was innately Tony. ‘Blame me.’ ‘Hold oneself accountable.’ “That’s not what I stopped you to talk about, anyway.” Tony waved the matter aside as if an old friend of his wasn’t blaming him for losing his wife. As if Clint hadn’t been warned that Steve was going to be doing something illegal. As if Tony was responsible for the justice system. Steve pulled out a seat and sat. His legs felt heavy. Tony started pacing. “I wanted to talk to you about that day, but I – and I know it’s me saying this; it surprises me, too – but my public speaking skills are somehow failing me.”

Public speaking skills. As if he was giving a speech. He stood up again, the chair scraping out from beneath him. “Tony, I don’t want you to give me any practiced lines about teamwork or support or – whatever you’re trying to say. If you aren’t comfortable speaking about it, then don’t.”

Tony pulled his lips back. It would have been a grimace if his teeth hadn’t been set quite so tightly. “I hate it when you do that. I’m trying to work myself up to something, and you go and twist it around. I’m trying to talk about it because I don’t _want_ it to go unsaid any longer.”

Oh. Steve shut his mouth.

“This is just it. In that…” He did grimace then, and looked away. “In that place. That dream. There were memories – false ones, obviously, but in there they’d been real – of us fighting. _Really_ fighting. You left the Avengers for a while. But we managed to work it out, because we may have disagreed, but we’d never lost faith in each other. Steve, I still have faith in you. I always have. But you never had faith in me.”

Steve wanted to deny it, but it was true. He stayed silent.

Tony nodded. “Yeah.” He paced a bit faster. His hands started flying, nearly banging into the chairs he passed. “You listed off all these reasons why we shouldn’t be together – kind of jumping the gun there, don’t you think? – and said. Well. Pretty sure you know what you said.”

This wasn’t anything Steve wanted to listen to, but he did. Something else he’d learned about Tony was that he sometimes worked things through out loud, even while his brain went four miles ahead. As if some things needed to be processed slower. Or as if he was linking something in his mind with something in his mouth. “It doesn’t take a genius – which I am, I’ll remind you – to figure out you’ve been playing Homophobia 101 with yourself in your head. Which I guess is understandable from a fogey like you.”

Steve might have been offended by that one four months ago. Now, thanks to watching interactions that had never really occurred between them, he knew it was actually some strange form of endearment. After all, when Tony wasn’t calling Rhodes his teddy bear, he was busy calling him a yes-man.

“But in your haste to vilify any potential relationship,” Tony said, and nearly smacked his wrist against the wall, “you haven’t even let us _become_ anything. Not even friends. You don’t even know me.”

“I didn’t,” Steve said, readily agreeing. “Well.” Tony finally stopped moving long enough for Steve to stare into those eyes. “I knew you were brilliant. I knew your armor was beautiful. I’d read your file, so I knew you were successful and…” He blushed. “Gorgeous.” Tony looked about speechless. Miracles happened, Steve supposed. “But you’re right. I didn’t know your personality. Not well enough. I thought that first meeting – that confrontation – well, we clicked together so well afterward that I was afraid…” He ended up making his own aborted movements, too. “It doesn’t matter.”

Tony sighed. The two of them stood only feet apart, both faces turned away from one another, their bodies slanted as if to cross through the table to meet in the middle. The divide between them couldn’t have been wider.

“Rhodey says I’m an idiot,” Tony said. His voice still held that fake mirth, but it was quieter. Despite himself, Steve reacted to it, let himself be drawn in closer. “You’ve hurt me enough, he says.”

“He’s right.”

Tony slapped out a hand, smacking into Steve’s chest as he came close. Steve stopped on a dime. “That’s what I hate about you!” he snapped. “You _do_ hurt me. And then you say shit like that! You’re such a goody-two-shoes, and yet you target me every time…!” He made a long, loud grunt of frustration and stepped into Steve’s space. Bridging the gap between them on his own. Deliberately setting himself against Steve. A smaller, weaker person, unafraid to stand his ground to those bigger and stronger than him. Steve recognized it and ached. Tony stabbed his chest with a finger. “And then you dragged me back here, saying you needed me! Saying you cared about me. Walking on eggshells around me for months. So when I demand you prove it this time, don’t you dare just give me words again! Give me something I can _work with!”_

Steve took Tony’s hand from where it rested against his chest, turned it around, and pressed a kiss into the palm. Tony froze. “Then. Tony. If you like – if you can accept me despite all the mistakes I’ve made and the pain I’ve caused – could you consider allowing me to date you?”

Tony blustered out something unintelligible. His body leaned so far away the man looked ready to tip over. _“I meant kiss me!”_

Well. That was something Steve could do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At eprnam's insistence (she didn't have to demand too hard, though...), there will be a short epilogue to this. I hope you've all enjoyed this story, and thank you so much for sticking with me! There's only a little left to go!
> 
> I also want to note here that under no circumstances is anyone obligated to forgive those who have hurt them. Though it's an innately Tony thing to do, there's no weakness or cruelty in putting your own sense of well-being first. Being a hero means saving yourself sometimes, too.


	10. Blackout Curtains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reality settles in.

“Welcome back, Wanda,” Steve said, smiling hugely as the young woman stepped through the elevator doors to the main foyer of the Avengers tower. Despite Tony being the one to co-sign her release, Steve could feel the tension radiating through the man standing next to him with every step closer Wanda took toward them. He rubbed Tony’s back.

She looked between the two of them for only a moment before focusing on Tony. She stepped into his personal space. Tony felt like a rubber band about to snap. “Tony,” she said, and her tone, her face, were so stonewalled even Steve couldn’t get a bead on her emotions.

“You’re in the room across from Vision again,” Tony said, his words coming unnaturally quickly. “And I don’t want to hear a thing about it when the two of you make up – that is entirely, one thousand percent your business–”

Steve lightly bumped his shoulder against Tony’s.

“And, you know, you’ll be able to train with everyone again. Well. Everyone but Clint, who hasn’t been cleared yet. Funny how you’re the one on the six-month mandatory psych eval thing and Clint’s the one still not on active duty–”

“Tony,” she said again, and when Tony made to continue his rambling on yet another random subject, she cut him off with a quick, “I’m sorry.”

Tony’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. She shifted slightly on her feet, but she didn’t look away. She’s grown up. “My first week in there, I was shown testimonials of people who’d been in Lagos and Sokovia and Johannesburg. Those people were terrified of me. They said they couldn’t trust the Avengers because I was on board. They called me a Nazi, said the reason Steve and the others didn’t see Hydra in SHIELD was because they were Nazi supporters. They… remembered me.” This time, Tony didn’t try to intervene. Neither did Steve, though his silence was due primarily to shock. “I never saw those before,” Wanda said. “Apparently they got pulled from most major news stations before getting aired. A few that _had_ been aired also had you talking about how people change, how everyone makes awful mistakes when they’re grieving. You tried to protect me and the others from all that. And when you’d been asked about Lagos, you spoke about time off for me to get help and training.” She took a deep breath. “You should have told me.”

Tony nodded jerkily. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have locked you up without–”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said, “although, yes, I was angry about that. But I thought – I thought it was just a punishment, that it was some PR pass. Those people called me a terrorist. They called for my _death_.”

All of this was news to Steve. Even after six months of reworking everything he’d thought he’d known about Tony, he still found himself surprised sometimes. He looked at the businessman, only to see those lips thinned. Old him would have labeled it anger or vindictiveness, simply because it would be easy then to ignore the way that face made his heart clench. He wrapped his hand around Tony’s and squeezed when he found those fingers trembling.

“You’re right,” Wanda continued. “Maybe I was too angry to see it. Too sure that I was right. But how can I learn if I’m babied?” She finally turned her gaze to Steve. “By everyone.”

Steve smiled. “You’re right. You’re not a kid, Wanda. I shouldn’t have treated you like one.”

She nodded. Then she looked around, as if seeing everything – everyone – for the first time. She blushed. “What’s this?”

Sam, standing several feet back with the rest of the welcoming committee beneath the banners and flags proclaiming ‘Welcome Home!’ and, for some reason known only to Tony, ‘A Very Merry Unbirthday!’, waved a short hello. Nat chuckled. “Uh,” Sam said, “welcome back?”

Wanda’s throat worked, but nothing came out. It was Vision, who had stuck to the outer linings of the room as they’d waited for Wanda’s return, who spoke. “It is good to see you well.” His voice, careful and sort-spoken, brought that blush back to Wanda’s cheeks. Tony grinned.

Steve bent low as the others slowly made their ways forward. “I’m not giving you that ten dollars.”

Tony snorted. Nat made for the kitchen counter while Clint, allowed in the tower for only two hours to help celebrate Wanda’s return, went to speak to the young woman. “As if I need your money. You’ll just have to make it up to me in another way.”

Wanda, still in earshot, wasn’t the only one to flush then. “What?” Steve stammered.

“That’s right. I want dirt. Steve blinked. Tony smirked. “You know Nat inside and out, and I haven’t managed a single point on her _yet_. So give me some dirt on her.”

“As if that could possibly give you some sort of advantage,” the woman quipped from the kitchen counter. She was handily wielding the knife as she cut the cake.

“It would if you’d let me wear my suit!”

Nat just snorted.

Steve watched the exchange with something heady in his chest. It stole his breath. Tony and Nat started a bickering contest while Rhodes and Sam set the table, since they’d been too busy swapping pre-Avengers antics to do so earlier. Vision stayed to the side, though he did speak with Scott, who had chosen to retire after the events with Thanos in order to spend time with his daughter and newlywed wife. The two fell into easy conversation despite not knowing each other very well. It likely also helped that Tony, having taken care of Scott’s daughter while the man was on the run, had been accepted wholeheartedly by the man, making him far more palatable in Vision’s books than, say… Clint.

Steve wished Clint would be more accepting of Tony. His acting put a rift in the team – Nat was tighter-lipped than usual, Vision avoided the others as if they were contagious; Wanda stood alone to the side, quickly ending her conversations to stand on her own. Overall, the cheerfulness in the room dissipated, as everyone waited for the snark that had become more cutting than sarcastic. Tony had tried to breach that gap over the months, no matter how often Nat and Rhodes argued that it wasn’t his job. Tony had even called up Laura and begged her to at least let Clint give his side of the story. Steve had watched with wide eyes as Tony, apparently on a first name basis now with not just Laura but also the kids, wheedled and cajoled until, finally, the woman had said, clear as day through the speaker of the phone, “all right, Tony. For you.”

Clint had ruined Tony’s efforts within five minutes, when he’d started cussing about Tony getting involved with his family behind his back. Laura had hung up on him. From what Steve knew, she hadn’t spoken to him since.

Otherwise, however, everyone at the party seemed to be getting along well. Once Nat had finished cutting the cake, she waved the knife and called out, “all right! Come grab some food before we’re all forced to endure a magic movie marathon.”

Sam snickered. “It’s hilarious and you know it.”

“What’s hilarious is that Steve chose ‘Alice In Wonderland’ for his pick.”

Steve blushed. In all honesty, it had been one of the few titles he had recognized. He was starting to think half the reason Tony had demanded this movie marathon had been for him.

Tony caught the blush and laughed. “Yeah, because choosing The Craft is so adult of you.”

“I have my reasons,” Nat said, and something passed between Tony and Nat that blew right over Steve’s head. He could imagine the basic content, however. Nat was quiet with her disdain, but it persisted with the same tenacity of Rhodes’. Nat had once told him that it was most important that they stick together. She was still upset over what she’d done, alienating Tony from her decision-making at the airport. She’d said she should have led Tony by example instead of doing the same thing others crucified him for. For what Wanda had done, however, she felt nothing but contempt. Rhodes had refused to celebrate Wanda’s return. Steve had a feeling the only reason Nat – and Vision – had decided to stay had been the carefully concealed hurt on Tony’s face.

Steve had asked her about it once. She’d mentioned something vague about ledgers.

Everyone crowded around the kitchen’s island and grabbed a plate of cake. Wanda was given the first slice, apparently surprised to find the strawberry icing, even though, by now, everyone should have known Tony took the time to learn everybody’s favorites.

Nat, Steve noticed, was careful to make sure Tony got the second piece.

They all sat around the kitchen and traded stories. Some feared broaching the subject of Wanda’s enforced psychiatric stay, but Tony snorted and said, “you want to avoid bringing up the very subject we’re here to celebrate? Good luck.” That said, Tony was the picture of class when he turned to Wanda and said, “so how was the slammer?”

Clint snorted. “You’re kidding me.”

Several scathing looks arced Clint’s way. Steve was almost surprised to find himself among them. Yet Wanda shrugged and said, “it wasn’t awful. Though no one wanted to get near me, just in case. So they kept me isolated for the first few months. I would say it… gave me something to think about. And it was better than the Raft. Thank you.”

Tony looked away, toward the living room and its over-sized television. “Good, then.”

“Don’t _thank_ him!” Clint said, once more breaking the easy mood. He _put_ you there!”

“I put myself there.” Wanda sent him a steely gaze. There was something strong about the line of her shoulders. Something Steve hadn’t seen before. “And I got myself out. By _earning_ it. Six months was my _minimum_ , if you’ll recall. My release today wouldn’t have been a guarantee if I hadn’t worked hard to prove I could handle it.” Clint didn’t immediately respond, and she continued. The atmosphere in the room got thicker and thicker with each word. “I was so caught up in how I felt that I didn’t think about anyone else. I’ve spent six months learning to look at things from the perspective of when I’d been trapped under that rubble. If I was still powerless, how would I feel about who I am now? I still don’t like the answer. It took over a month for me to even admit it.”

“You don’t owe us explanations,” Tony said. Nat made an immediate sound of dissent. Tony ignored her. “What happened over the last half-year is your business only.” This time, Nat made a slight noise of assent. Tony grinned. Steve, sitting next to him, watched those lips spread wide.

Clint hunched his shoulders and looked away. Steve wondered if there wasn’t a way they could make _him_ go to counseling, as well.

Everyone started asking Wanda their own questions, mostly about innocuous things like the food or the daily schedule. Sam asked if she’d been treated well, to which she agreed, though she admitted to being furious over how they’d kept her as if in quarantine the first few weeks, until the doctors had finally drilled it into her head that they didn’t trust her to not force them to think she was well when she wasn’t. “It had been an eye-opener,” she said, “to have those people admit that they didn’t trust me to not mess with their heads. After what I did, though… I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise. But it was.” Vision had asked her something else, his voice very low. She’d flushed and looked down. “Not yet,” she said. “I’m still scary to the rest of the world. So not yet.”

They eventually moved on the lighter topics, and thought Steve couldn’t be sure, he thought some sort of tension that had been in the room had been released. Clint’s attitude, which had regressed to little more than hunched muttering, his arms crossed as he kept away from the festivities, was a pall on an otherwise perfect evening, but Tony seemed content to ignore his existence and carry on, and everyone else tried their best to do the same. They eventually all – all but Clint – drifted over to the living room, where they curled up all over the couch and chairs to get ready for an interminable length of magical movies. The first was Tony’s pick – Matilda. Steve had never so much as heard of the movie, but Tony seemed legitimately excited about watching it. “And you make fun of me for not choosing an adult film,” Nat said as the opening credits rolled.

“What are you talking about?” Tony scoffed in return. “Matilda is a _classic._ ” And Tony leaned into Steve’s side as he took his place on the couch beside Steve, who rested on one arm. Wanda was given the seat of honor on the chaise while Vision settled a bit uncomfortably on the chair, still not used to the idea of sitting. Sam and Scott messed with one another for a bit before Scott took the chair and Sam the edge of the L-shaped sofa, while Nat sat next to Tony. Popcorn popped in the microwave, not because any of them were that hungry after the cake, but because it was ‘a necessity for any movie night.’

Tony looked around again as the narrator started the story. Tony was curling his legs onto the long couch while Sam leaned back far enough to stretch his own legs out where he sat. Clint may have remained at the island, but everyone else had gathered up like lounge bunnies to curl up in front of the TV. Nat shoved Tony’s shoulder and giggled over the movie again, saying he “just wanted to see someone on screen who was as smart as him.” To which Tony replied that he’d once desperately wanted telekinesis, too. Steve tucked that random piece of information away into his ever-increasing pile of things he’d never bothered learning about Tony before. The pile had grown enormous over the last half-year, and had shown him someone far more beautiful than he’d once been ready to admit.

He wrapped his arm around Tony’s shoulders now. “A classic, huh?” he said, grinning down at Tony as the man craned his neck up to look at him. “I don’t remember it coming out.”

Tony made a face. “There are classics, and then there’s the Criterion Collection,” he said. Another reference that Steve missed, but he’d realized over the past months that it was just Tony’s way of speaking. It wasn’t an insult to him. “Just you wait. You’ll learn why Matilda is timeless.”

He’d already learned enough about making false assumptions about things before getting to know them. He leaned down and kissed Tony’s temple. “I’m just excited to see something you like this much.”

Tony blushed. It still amazed Steve, that he could make a man as experienced as Tony look like a flushed teenager. It charmed something deep within him. Tony looked back to the movie when it brought up Matilda learning to take care of herself at age two. Steve turned to it, as well.

Scott went and grabbed the popcorn finished, and the man buttered the kernels up while talking quietly to Clint. When he returned, Nat immediately grabbed her portion and chucked a few pieces at Sam as he joked about whether Moby Dick was indeed a “wonderful book.” Sam in turn threw a couple of Vision as he argued that Moby Dick was an interesting read. The android just shifted until the kernels flew through him, and Nat declared Vision the winner.

Tony acted like he couldn’t see it, but Steve knew better. They’d all gathered together in Tony’s home. A family. Just like he’d imagined in the deepest parts of his heart. If only… but about a third of the way through the movie, Cling turned from where he sat and watched the movie, as well. He stayed apart from them all, but even his sullenness couldn’t seem to break his desire to stay, if only for Wanda’s sake, or to say he didn’t give in. The movie – or perhaps the way they all joked and laughed, the popcorn dwindling between them as they cheered on Bruce Bogtrotter and talked about ways to get Ms. Trunchbull fired.

They weren’t quite there. It wasn’t the same as the fantasy. But finally, finally, Tony had the Avengers family he’d always wanted. And Steve… he looked down, studied the swirl of that dark hair. The body against his was warm, the deep thunder of that laugh tingling up his side as Tony moved against him. He’d gotten something of a dream for himself. Bucky was still in cryo. Peggy was still dead. But this sort of future wasn’t so bad.

He rested his head on top of Tony’s and looked back to the screen as a single person, one grown into a difficult home, found a strength to save others and a family to call her own.


End file.
